Dear Editor:

OK, Joe Friday is a fictional character, but the father of toxicology was not. Paracelsus wisely said that “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone is the thing that makes it not a poison” long before the climate change theory was proposed.

And so, let’s take a closer look at the air we all breathe about twenty times per minute just to stay alive. Carbon dioxide constitutes four one-hundredths of one percent (or 400 parts per million). Seventy-eight percent is nitrogen, 21 percent is oxygen, 0.9 percent is argon, and 0.1 percent are other gases. 

Clearly, it is scientific rubbish to claim without proof that such a small magnitude of CO2 could be dooming humanity, especially when one considers that 500 million years ago CO2 constituted over 5,000 parts per million of the Earth's atmosphere. Just 150 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, CO2 was 1,700 parts per million, more than four times what it is now.  Life thrived during those periods. Even the tiniest pea-brain can easily grasp that our current CO2 level of 400 parts per million in no way threatens our existence.

Founding Father John Adams brilliantly said that “facts are stubborn things,” and here is the stubbornest one of all. At the beginning of the fossil fuel era 200 years ago, CO2 comprised 250 parts per million of our atmosphere, and it has been growing at about one part per million per year for the past 150 years. In sum, a very small magnitude of CO2 is growing at a very slow rate, and that rate has not increased in a century and a half.

As Paracelsus noted centuries ago, everything is potentially toxic, but it is all about the dosage, something that the paid-for climate emergency liars-by-omission don’t want you to know anything about. At least they’re getting one thing right.

Phil Molvar

Southport