On Sep 19, 4:31*pm, John Smith wrote:
On 9/19/2010 3:54 PM, Joe from Kokomo wrote:

...
Well, it's not energy per se. It's the gaseous droplets and particulate
matter ejected into the air by volcanoes.

Absolute FACT #1: Carbon dioxide IS a "greenhouse" gas (lets solar heat
in but won't let it escape).
...

Actually, cO2 is rather benign and not any real thing to worry about.
Anyone growing marijuana or aquarium plants, and supplying them with
excess cO2, knows the voracious appetite of plants for carbon dioxide.
The effect of adding more cO2 is very dramatic on plant growth. *When we
finally find another fuel source, the plants will clean up this problem
very quickly. *All life on this planet is carbon based, carbon is a
nutrient, not a poison.

The point is missed.

Yes, pound for pound, CO2 as a GHG is mild compared to methane, water
vapor, nitrous oxide and a number of other GHGs. The problem is that
there is so much more of it, especially after we have been releasing
300,000,000 years' worth in a geologic blink of an eye. A human being
is a lot bigger than an army ant, but pit him against a million ants
and see what happens.

The plant population of this planet is no match for the hundreds of
millions of years' worth of dead plants we have quickly released back
to the outer environment. The CO2 concentration has risen drastically
in the last 250 years, and continues to go up exponentially - if
plants were able to absorb it, this effect would have been obvious by
now, and it's not. Moreover, the plant-based systems that could
absorb it - rainforests, temperate forests and even the oceanic
plankton - are currently so decimated by man's other activities that
their capacity for sequestration are quite limited.

Nobody claims that elemental carbon or CO2 is a poison.