Don't Touch It! It's Eeee-vil!!

Ok, I've officially had it with the carbon lunacy.   What set me off is this unbearable quote from a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman:

"It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation."

Okay, listen up now.  Carbon is our friend!  How is this not completely obvious to everyone, everywhere?  Without carbon, you wouldn't have a lot of things that you might start to miss, like:

• pencils
  
• sugar
• gasoline
• graphite-based lubricants
  
• coal (used in electrical power generation)
• archaeological dating (i.e., carbon dating with C-14)
  
• diamonds
• life itself
  

...and of course, everyone's favorite greenhouse gas:  CO2.  But that much-maligned gas doesn't account for much "global warming" effect.  In fact, it's less than 5%.  Why?  Because water vapor accounts for the other 95% of it!!  Worse yet, 97% of that CO2 comes from naturally-occurring sources.  Humans create only 3% of that 5% of "greenhouse effect" arising from CO2.  So we could shut down our factories, communications, transportation and the whole world economy to live in squalid indigence forevermore, and only improve the situation by one-tenth of a percent.

In other words, a negligible degree.

Look at the graph below.  The primary contributor, by far, to greenhouse effect is water vapor.  Note that this is a log-scale graph of percentage.  CO2 accounts for less than a tenth of what water vapor does.  And man contributes virtually nothing to that.

data source

Man-made CO2 is  significant, compared to natural CO2.  But compared to water vapor, it's nothing.

Friedman also states, in the same article, that:

"China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15."

Is he actually bemoaning the lack of enthusiasm for nuclear power in western nations?  Do liberals really allow him to do that?   I thought nuclear power was the devil's hand incarnate (e.g., Three Mile Island, Chernobyl).

Sigh...