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Originally Posted by Old Mechanic
The doomsday predictions continue. Atmoshperic oxygen levels were once 35% or 350,000 parts per million. They have dropped to just under 21% in catastrpohic events and historical time periods. Lower oxygen levels were the principle reason for human evolution.
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Bull. Yes, the Earth's atmosphere once - about 300 million years ago - had higher oxygen levels just as it once was composed of methane &c with no oxygen:
Geological history of oxygen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Give life a few hundred million years to evolve, and it will handle such things just fine.
If you have a time machine and could skip ahead a hundred million years or so, it's pretty likely that you'd find the planet once again filled with life, the evolved descendants of what few creatures manage to survive the Anthropocene extinction event. Just as we are the evolved descendants of the few that survived the Permian-Triassic extinction.
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CO2 being the basis for plant growth would lead any rational person to say, grow more plants.
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Sorry, but your "rational person" obviously doesn't know much about plant growth. CO2 is not the basis for plant growth, any more than oxygen is the basis for animal growth. Increasing CO2 does not (in general) increase plant growth, which is limited by factors like sunlight, temperature, water, and minerals.
The lower prehistoric CO2 levels were more than sufficient for plant growth - obviously, since there were plants in profusion. Nor do we find that plants are growing faster than they were a century ago because of the increases in CO2.