Memes That Kill: Carbon Dioxide as Plant Food

A new meme is invading the memesphere

Joe Rogan: CO2 is good. It makes Earth greener. What could the problem be with it?

The battle for the memesphere is in full swing. The latest climate-related meme that’s becoming popular is “CO2 is plant food,” hence it is good, healthy, and useful. The clip by Joe Rogan above is just one of the many forms the meme takes. Look at these data from Google Trends:

The meme is growing. It is still a small element of the memesphere, but memes grow fast, just like biological viruses and bacteria. Soon, it may become a major element of the discussion on climate.

This meme is not simply dangerous; it is potentially lethal. Not everyone realizes how CO2 is far from being an “inert gas” as it is often described. It is a chemically active gas that interacts with the ecosystem in various ways, including altering the regulation mechanisms of the human body with long-term consequences that, at present, are impossible to evaluate but that we can’t assume to be good. And CO2 is not even good plant food. For a discussion on this point, see my recent paper uploaded on ArXiv: “Carbon Dioxide as a Pollutant.”

Unfortunately, bad memes never come alone. The main problem is that the “CO2 is plant food” meme may become coupled with the “solar radiation management” (SRM) meme. Then, plenty of people will jump to the consequence that we can keep burning fossil fuels as long as we want. Why not? CO2 is beneficial, while SRM can handle the warming problem at a low cost.

This could well be the greatest recipe for disaster in history, possibly even worse than when Napoleon announced to his generals that he had decided to invade Russia. The “CO2 is Plant Food” meme is also interacting with the growth of a series of aggressive memes that aim to demolish the very foundations of climate science. This is the latest example, a post by James Delingpole.

It is worth reading or at least skimming through it. This guy wrote a book titled “Watermelons,” and it was a well chosen title because with this post he shows he’s truly gone watermelons. And also nuts, mangos, almonds, cashews, and several other kinds of fruit-related madness.

Why is this happening? Memes have their own laws and mechanisms. They are virtual creatures, but they behave as if they were alive. They appear and disappear, grow and collapse. They are decoupled from reality, you can’t fight them with data, reason, or facts. Daniel Dennett defined a human being as “a meme-infested ape,” and he was basically right. Often, we behave as if we were mere puppets of the memes we carry in our minds; we tend to believe what we would like to be true, and we fail to apply the reality-based filters we all carry. I noticed how the meme “CO2 is plant food” has affected even people who should have known better, who fall into the trap of thinking that this poor molecules has been unjustly demonized by the powers that be

In time, the real reality will eliminate bad memes (or the people who diffuse them). But that takes time. For the time being, we can only do the best we can to maintain our mental sanity.

________________________________________________

See also an excerpt from my paper on CO2 as a pollutant. Note also that SRM could actually reduce CO2 concentrations when coupled with the carbon cycle, but that implies humans won’t take that as an excuse to increase emissions.