I hope they cancel all funding for the monumental waste of money on global warming, or its stealthy moniker "climate change" (as though the climate hasn't been changing throughout earth's history!)
CO2 is not only vital for its well known roles as plant food and oxygen generation via photosynthesis. It has a largely unrecognized role as being responsible for the slowly continuous vertical convection of thermal energy from the earth's surface (where it absorbs solar radiation) up to the tropopause, beyond which this energy is radiated into outer space.
Without this convective thermal "resistance" provided by CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the surface of the earth would be much colder and unable to support life as we know it. Thus CO2 is largely responsible for the single most striking feature of earth's atmosphere--the critical warm layer of the troposphere, within which life can flourish.
Current atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are 1/10 or less than those encountered in geologic times, during which the earth was much greener and life was abundant. In fact, we're not that far from a cataclysmic lower bound, below which photosynthesis would be extinguished.
It's time to stop this politically driven, model-centric gravy train! John Von Neumann once commented about models, that "with four parameters I can draw an elephant, and with five, I can make it wiggle its trunk." Those of us who have worked with models in the real world have been humbled by their frequent abject failures to reflect reality.
I mostly agree, TRex. Two especially toxic NASA departments which need to get the axe are the JPL Earth Science Communication Team in Pasadena, and GISS in NYC. Both of them act as taxpayer funded propagandists for the parasitic climate industry.
However, I disagree with you on one minor point. Fortunately, powerful natural feedback mechanisms ensure that we won't reach the "cataclysmic lower bound" that you mentioned.
The higher the CO2 level goes, the faster natural sinks, like dissolution into the oceans and terrestrial greening, remove CO2 from the air. That's why the atmospheric CO2 level has risen by only about 145 ppmv, even though we've added about twice that much to the atmosphere. It's also why the CO2 level cannot go below about 190 ppmv, because below that point C3 plants (i.e., most plants!) cannot extract the CO2 that they need from the air. That's rough on the plants, but it also means the CO2 level stops going down.
C4 plants can scavenge CO2 from air even at lower concentrations, but, thankfully, almost all C4 plants are grasses, so they don't sequester much carbon for more than a couple of seasons.
(Be thankful that there're no C4 trees! In the long term C4 trees could drive CO2 levels so low that C3 plants -- i.e., most plants! -- would be driven into extinction. So if you ever encounter a plant geneticist trying to engineer C4 trees, STOP HIM!)
But that doesn't mean CO2 reduction isn't harmful. In fact, when CO2 levels were below about 350 ppmv, catastrophic famines, usually triggered by drought, frequently devastated large regions. For comparison:
● COVID-19 killed about 0.1% of the world's population
● The catastrophic 1918 flu pandemic killed about 2%
● WWII killed 2.7% of the world's population
● But the near-global drought and famine of 1876-78 killed about 3.7% of the world's population.
Thankfully, catastrophic, drought-triggered famines are fading from living memory, and one of the main reasons is the 50% increase in average atmospheric CO2 level.
Elevated CO2 makes agriculture much more productive through "CO2 fertilization," and it also improves water use efficiency and drought resilience for all plants, by reducing stomatal conductance and, consequently, water loss through transpiration.
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