https://cognitivecarbon.substack.com/p/exoplanets-tardigrades-and-earths
Exoplanets, Tardigrades, and Earth's Carbon Dioxide: A Thought Experiment "We are not the Enemy of Nature, but It's Salvation." —Patrick Moore, London, October 2015
There is one final piece of the puzzle to touch on, and then we’ll start to tie all of the pieces together.
A few years ago, I listened (on YouTube) to a talk given by Patrick Moore, who was once a founder of the Greenpeace organization but has now evolved to be a highly credible “climate alarmism” skeptic.
In his talk, Patrick points out that atmospheric CO2 has been steadily declining over the past 160 million years (see the chart below) and he points out that, were the downward trend to continue as it has been for millions of years, CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere could, in a “near” geologic timespan fall below a level that is necessary to support plant life, thus extinguishing most of the life on the planet that depends on plant life for oxygen and nutrients.
Moore makes the point that we, as humans who are contributing to a rise in atmospheric CO2—and thus, contributing to a counter-trend reversal of this hundred-million year downtrend—are therefore “not the enemy of Nature, but its Salvation”.
For most of its history, CO2 levels on Earth have been in the thousands of ppm. There was plenty of life on the planet during those times, not that humans would do so well. Maybe, unbeknownst to us, we were sent here to generate CO2 and give life a kick start. It's like the old joke, Earth had a tendency to accumulate tar and there was no way to get rid of it, so God created man.