Googling that phrase, I got 93,000 hits -- most of them involving the argument that even if carbon dioxide is not causing global warming, that it's still a threat to the oceans.

Whether it is or not isn't my point. The reason I Googled the phrase is that I have noticed a rather odd shift in the rhetoric recently -- particularly since more and more skeptics, crackpots, contrarians, and "deniers" have been advancing the argument that CO2 rises after warmer temperatures and thus cannot be logically charged with causing the rise in temperatures.

This comment to an earlier post is typical:

The Vostok ice core samples have shown conclusively that CO2 rises following all past episodes of global warming.

Therefore, since cause can not precede effect, increased levels of CO2 could not have caused global warming.

But CO2 as the cause of global warming is the central pillar of the Gorebots' argument. Without that argument, which has been decisively destroyed, the Goron's implosion has begun.

No argument, no matter how unreasonable or wrong, can ever be truly destroyed except in the minds of the people who think it has been destroyed. It is one thing to analyze these things in terms of logic or by weighing the evidence and attempting to decide them fairly. But logic and fairness will not matter to people who simply want to believe. They will always believe, even if their numbers shrink to a small but fervent hard core.

And numbers (of believers, or disbelievers as the case may be) are what matter most.

Back to CO2. As the theories are highly speculative anyway and open to interprepetation (how much CO2 does it take to actually warm the planet? What is man's share of the total and how much does it matter?), the ultimate truths may not be known for decades. Therefore, what matters is how many people there are on the post hoc ergo propter hoc side of the argument. If enough people start to think that high temperatures precede CO2 and not the other way around, this, obviously, is devastating to the numbers of believers, because it's easy for the common man to grasp that something that occurs after a problem cannot be said to be the cause of the problem.

Which means that if you're an anti-CO2 warrior, you need to crank out what lawyers call arguments in the alternative.

For the purposes of this post it really doesn't matter who is right or wrong about CO2 as a culprit in global warming or oceanic destruction. I've expressed my skepticism countless times, particularly about the hysteria that's been generated, and the morality that's been manufactured.

It just strikes me that if preserving this new morality is seen as crucial, there will be a relentless campaign to preserve man-made CO2 as the ultimate villain.

The enemy is everywhere.

Breathing is evil.

MORE: I'd still like to know whether it is true that man-made C02 constitutes only 3.28% of the total CO2 (and thus only 0.117% of the greenhouse effect) as this site maintains. There's a fascinating debate here, punctuated with much name-calling. But if man's share is in fact anywhere near as low as the proferred numbers claim, Al Gore's campaign against media balance becomes quite understandable.

UPDATE (03/23/07): Clayton Cramer (after watching the "Global Swindle" documentary) did a little digging, and came up with a very interesting collection of scientific papers and abstracts about solar activity changes and cosmic ray flux, which by changing the amount of cloud cover "play[] a substantial role in altering temperatures."

BTW, Cramer used this search string in scholar.google.com.

Nice work!