RUSH: Alan in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: Good afternoon. Mega dittos, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: The air that we breathe, our atmosphere, contains a lot of different things, nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, particulate matter, pollutants, and carbon dioxide.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: When we inhale our body captures the oxygen, some water vapor, particulate matter, and pollutants.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And then we exhale what the body doesn’t capture. So the carbon dioxide that we’re exhaling is the same carbon dioxide we inhale. Therefore there’s no increase in the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere.
RUSH: You mean from humans?
CALLER: Right. I heard you say earlier we create carbon dioxide by breathing. But we’re just passing it through our body. It’s already there.
RUSH: No, no, no, what I read was that humans contribute via exhalation 30% of the CO2 that’s out there. You are telling me something, and as host, you know, I’m very confident and comfortable in my own skin, I did not know what you say. I’m not afraid to admit that I didn’t know it.
CALLER: I’m not going to question you.
RUSH: I know you’re not questioning me. I’ve never heard your theory explained. I’m not doubting you, don’t misunderstand.
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: Okay. Well, I appreciate the information.
CALLER: Thank you very much, sir. Have a good day.
RUSH: You bet. You do, too, and thanks for holding on.
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RUSH: We have a physicist on the line from Long Island, New York. Greetings, my friend, and welcome to you, doctor.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. First-time caller, longtime listener. I’m on a cell phone so I can’t really talk long but I did hear the comment about CO2 and I called to correct it.
RUSH: You mean about the CO2 that we breathe in and breathe out canceling out?
CALLER: Yeah. It doesn’t cancel out. You take in food through your stomach, including lots and lots of carbon, amino acids, you break them down, too, and then all of the cells of your body oxidize the carbon, what you get from your food, and combine the oxygen you breath in with the carbon, you’re oxidizing carbon and breathing out carbon dioxide. Now, the other half of the cycle is the plants. The carbon dioxide that we breathe out is food for them. They change it into oxygen and starch.
RUSH: Right. And so the net effect here is what? We do contribute net to the overall amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
CALLER: We do contribute. Unfortunately the gentleman that called in was misinformed. We do breathe out more carbon dioxide than we take in but plants put out more oxygen than carbon dioxide we take in.
RUSH: In fact, they love it. The more carbon dioxide the better, they grow, they flourish.
CALLER: Right. If they regulate it they’re going to kill all the plants.
RUSH: I know that you’re a physicist and you’re a scientist first, but I can’t accept the notion that something human beings, who I believe were created, do, is a virtue of our creation, would contribute to the destruction of the environment we need to live, it just makes no sense to me.
CALLER: Makes no sense at all. It’s a natural process. It’s a cycle. We breathe out the carbon dioxide, and that’s food for the plants, and they make oxygen for us. We’re in balance, and the man-made effects don’t affect the climate in the first place.
RUSH: Yeah, via the process of photosynthesis.
CALLER: Yeah, the plants take energy from the sun and they make the oxygen. Without the plants we’d be dead and without the carbon dioxide the plants would be dead.
RUSH: Let me ask you something else I’ve heard and see if this is true.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: I keep hearing from various nonscientists that we’re deforesting too much of the country, which we’re not, that we need grasslands, wetlands, we can’t cut down trees because we need all of that to breathe. Somebody once said to me, I think it was a climatologist, I’m not sure, said we get all the photosynthesis we would need in an average lawn.
CALLER: I don’t know if that would do it for the whole earth, but there’s certainly a lot of green around and I don’t think we’re in jeopardy of —
RUSH: Of course not.
CALLER: — starving if we cut down some forests. On the other hand, we do need the trees. You can’t wipe ’em all out.
RUSH: Exactly, especially if we’re putting more CO2 in the atmosphere via the burning of carbon fuels and so forth. Doctor, I’m glad you called. Thanks very much. (interruption) There was a lot of consensus there. Well, no consensus between the caller and this guy. And, by the way, we didn’t take this call to embarrass the previous caller, Alan. That was not the purpose. I just had never heard what Alan said. I’ve never heard that. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I didn’t know it. You know, I’m a very confident guy, very comfortable in my own skin. There’s so little I don’t know that it doesn’t bother me to admit I don’t know something. So I’m glad to get the call to correct it from a physicist, a man of physics, that’s what a physicist is, for those of you in Rio Linda.
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RUSH: I just got a flash from our official climatologist here at the EIB Network, Dr. Roy Spencer (University of Alabama-Huntsville) informing me that Mother Nature absorbs, gobbles up, uses an average of 35 million tons of CO2 per day that we produce through the burning of fossil fuels. Mother Nature gobbles it up. It doesn’t just pile up.