Published on January 25, 2020. This article introduces a column by Kudan Yasunosuke from the monthly magazine Hanada, discussing the EU’s climate-policy budget, criticism of Japan at COP25, and Patrick Moore’s paper questioning the common view that CO² is the culprit behind global warming. It presents the dissenting argument that CO² is the food of life and that a decline in its concentration could turn Earth into a dead planet.

January 25, 2020
A German reporter says:
“Even if the cost is shared among EU member states, no country, including my Germany, would be able to bear such an enormous expense.”
The following is from a serialized column by Kudan Yasunosuke, published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Hanada, released yesterday.
Kudan Yasunosuke appears to be the pen name of Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
The “CO² Villain Theory” That Turns Earth into a Dead Planet
Von der Leyen, the former German defense minister who recently became president of the European Commission, announced that she would allocate a budget of one trillion euros, or about 120 trillion yen, to measures against global warming.
A German reporter says:
“Even if the cost is shared among EU member states, no country, including my Germany, would be able to bear such an enormous expense.”
The recent COP25 officially declared that “if things continue as they are, global warming will rise by three degrees Celsius from the age of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, we aim for zero CO² emissions by the end of this century.”
At this conference, Japan, which newly built coal-fired power plants, was criticized as a “fossil nation.”
In this way, the “CO² villain theory,” which says that carbon dioxide is the culprit behind global warming, has become the world’s accepted view.
However, there is an academic theory that raises fundamental doubts about this accepted view.
Below, I quote in summary from Sōki Watanabe’s The Collapse of the American Democratic Party, 2001–2020.
In June 2016, a scientific paper titled “The Positive Impact of Human CO² Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth” was published.
Its author, Patrick Moore, was a co-founder of Greenpeace Canada and, so to speak, had been a radical in the environmental movement.
That Moore says:
“Global warming is a complete fabrication. It is something fabricated in order to instill fear in people’s hearts and restrict human rights and freedom. And Greenpeace has even joined in this.”
Moore’s argument was something more fundamental than the debate over global warming.
He pointed out anew that all life on Earth depends on atmospheric carbon, CO², and argued that if CO², the “food” of living organisms, falls below a certain level, Earth will become a dead planet.
The CO² currently present in the atmosphere is only 400 ppm, or 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.
The lower limit of CO² necessary for plants to survive is 150 ppm, and if it falls to that level, plants will lack the food, CO², that they take in, and will begin to “starve.”
Life on this Earth began to spread explosively in the Cambrian period of the Paleozoic era, about 540 million years ago, and the atmospheric CO² concentration at that time is estimated to have been 7,000 ppm, meaning there was seventeen times as much food as today.
By the time the Paleozoic era ended, about 240 million years ago, plants had eaten up the food, and the atmospheric concentration had fallen to 400 ppm, almost the same as today.
The reason for the decline in concentration was that the microorganisms of that time did not have enzymes to decompose the vast amount of fallen trees, and therefore the CO² absorbed by the trees was fixed and not returned to the atmosphere.
The fallen trees, without being decomposed, formed thick layers, which then carbonized into peat through heat and pressure.
Fortunately, by the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era, about 240 million years ago, microorganisms had acquired decomposing enzymes, and CO² concentration began to recover, reaching 2,500 ppm by the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era, about 200 million years ago.
However, from the Cretaceous period, about 140 million years ago, it has continued to decline consistently, and Arctic ice-core drilling surveys have confirmed that 18,000 years ago it had fallen to 180 ppm.
It was just short of reaching 150 ppm, the lower limit for the survival of living organisms.
CO² dissolves easily in water.
As the temperature of seawater rose due to global warming, the dissolved CO² was released into the atmosphere.
It increased to 260 ppm ten thousand years ago, and to 280 ppm around the Industrial Revolution, and afterward, through the use of fossil fuels, it finally returned to 400 ppm.
Moore says:
“In the next ice age, there is a risk that the CO² concentration will fall below 180 ppm due to the decline in seawater temperature. If that happens, it will have to be supplemented by CO² emissions from human productive activity. If so, we may be able to secure enough CO² to maintain agricultural production.”
Moore further says:
“For plant growth, a CO² concentration of more than 1,000 ppm is necessary, and for most of Earth’s history the environment had such concentrations. If CO² emissions from human activity disappear, CO² may fall to the limit level of 150 ppm. Do believers in the CO² villain theory have a scenario to stop this? If it falls that far, plants will starve, and life will disappear from Earth.”
Around the time this paper appeared, America was in the middle of a presidential election.
Whether Trump read it or not, he had long referred to “the lie of global warming.”
“Global warming, the CO² villain theory, is a lie created by China in order to rob American manufacturing of its competitiveness,” he said in 2012.
Therefore, as soon as he became president, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement.
Japan was abused as a “fossil nation,” but it is better to know that dissenting views like Moore’s also exist.