Yep, going with international consensus has really done us a lot of good lately, hasn't it?
Ummm...CO2 is a natural substance. When allowed to do their job, plants, trees, and other vegitation helps to cycle this stuff. From what I remember, the oceans themselves play a major roll in the CO2 cycle.
I just don't see how the process of liquifying the stuff and pumping it 300 miles and into old oil wells is considered an "efficient" way of disposing of this "greenhouse" gas.
Plants and CO2:
It is true that plants sequester CO2 (including aquatic life, with simple sea plankton and algae being a major carbon sink). Because of the increased levels of CO2 we are actuall seeing a slight increase in growth rates in individual trees and plants. Problem is though, we're cutting down most of the trees. So there's fewer of them to fix the carbon out of the air (bare dirt and farmland provide almost no carbon sequestration).
Making the problem worse is we are losing a lot of forest to slash and burn in the tropics, releasing all the carbon they've stored up.
You are right. Plants do absorb CO2, and they will continue to do so, and the rates of sequestration for an individual plant will increase and adjust to higher CO2 levels. And, if pressed I believe any scientist will even tell you that we will reach a balance at some point to where CO2 output will be equal to CO2 sequestration (so that levels will steady and no longer increase). But such a balance will still leave us with higher atmospheric levels of CO2 than we have currently. This will still result in a warmer planet.
We're not talking about the end of the world here. But we are talking about the *changing* of the world. Specifically we are talking about the warming of the planet, a warming that we can measure even today, a warming that is already causing species that can to migrate to higher latittudes, a warming that we already know is mostly human caused.
This is a warming that may result in some benefits, such as longer growing periods in some areas. But also a warming that will mean desertificatoin of some places and mass flooding of others as sea levels rise.
No, the world wont end. But massive climate change on a global scale is no small matter either.
Understanding that plants absorb CO2 is a small (but important) piece of a much larger and mildly more complex picture.