During an Internet debate in February, federal climatologist Michael McCracken (not a global warming skeptic) revealed that rising CO2 concentrations may have banished forever the disastrous Ice Ages that have bedeviled the Earth for the past few million years.
Scientists generally credit human activities, especially fossil fuel burning, for the atmospheric build-up of CO2. Plants need CO2, and synthesize their food from it.
So humans appear to be saving the planet not only from disastrously low levels of CO2 (which atmospheric concentrations approached at one point in the past few hundred thousand years), but also from the scourge of Ice Ages that have dominated climate for the most recent few million years.
