'What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?': Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions

Remarkable how ignorant these people are that push these green initiatives. I’m glad they got exposed.

The ignorance of those who would presume to regulate our lives is staggering.

If this committee worked for me, they'd be gone the very next minute. You're all fired! Done, get out. Next.

Can these people please resign immediately?

My physics textbook from 1970 states CO2 is 0.04%. Now more than 50 years later the answer still is.....0.04%. (Edit: Now it is a year later and I have been inundated with replies (several hundreds). Some are polite and some are nasty and arrogant. I worked in a qualitative/quantitative/thermal analysis laboratory for 34 years at a large university. Please do not insist that atmospheric CO2 is never reported as a percent. That is incorrect. I had a state of the art Gas Chromatograph, and reports were always generated as percentages in scientific notation which makes sense because you cannot report "contents" in different units when the normalized total is 100%. Lastly, the original comment was a simple factoid which for some odd reason offends many people. I am 71, and if I said that "55 years ago I saw something unusual or interesting", why would you countermand it? It was a very simple statement that (at the time) I had no reason to disbelieve or believe; my life has not revolved around this textbook. My basic point is: why is everyone quibbling over 40 to 45 ppm of CO2? Please accept that IMO it is not harmful. If you have a different opinion that is fine with me. IMO, stating that CO2 has risen by a third in the last century means nothing to me. Stating it has risen by 45 PPM in the last 60 years is at least objective. Please refrain from posting comments that are not objective. Thank you.

It’s a total humiliation that those panelists can’t answer such a simple question while wanting to impose $multi-billion laws. Frankly they should all resign.

I'm a Science teacher with 40 yrs experience. The composition of gases in our atmosphere is a standard piece of info taught to 13 yr old school students. Many years ago Carl Sagan stated many times of his concern that, despite all of us are living in societies largely measured and driven by advances in Technology and Science, there is barely a politician in any government anywhere who has a background in Science. Just brood on that conflict for a minute.

Thank you LaMalfa for always standing up for the people of Northern California.

Politicians are the only people who can get away with being this absurdly incompetent at their jobs.

How embarrassing and disgraceful it is that people who are in charge literally know nothing about the things they are forcing onto the general public, despicable.

Thank you Mr. LaMalfa! We need more people like you!

❤ TRUTH is POWER ❤

If you rephrase "Ban CO2" as "Ban plant food", you see how ridiculous this whole agenda is.

A classic example of politicians introducing laws for things they totally don’t understand

This is a cheap shot. I work in a chemistry lab unrelated to weather and report numbers in PPM. ( parts per million or milligrams per kilogram. ( then there are volume/ volume units too. ) 1 % is 10000 PPM. When you ask people who use the numbers they often forget to think 1% is 10,000 0.1% is 1000. 0.04 % is 400 PPM. 400 PPM CO2 is higher than it has been in many thousands of year. It is not surprising that under pressure someone who has been reading the in PPM has an awkward moment. On the left I am frustrated by people saying things like we need a state committee right away to plan for sea level rise of I think it was a few Centimeters in the next 20 years. On the right articles like this to make the problem seem small.  In my life CO2 has got up from under 300 to over 400 PPM..Not a trivial amount. Exactly what the consequences will be I have not studied enough to form strong opinion other than it has got a measurable bit warmer. Policy makers should avoid cheap shots like this to embarrass their opponents. It just clouds the discussion.

Its bad that folk don't know the basic facts. It's also bad to suggest that, because its a small percentage, it doesn't need to cause concern.

This is crazy! How on earth is this level of ignorance acceptable from people who claims to know how we should live!?

How unfortunate that non-technical people are making technical decisions with no idea about what they are doing.

*Totally stupid question! For example, the proportion of CFCs in the atmosphere is only 0.0000x%. * Even these minimal quantities (1 CFC molecule per x million others) destroy the ozone layer. Since 1960, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by almost 40% and temperatures in Europe by over 1.5 degrees.

This isn’t quite the own that LaMalfa and this comment section think it is. The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere being very small actually makes it worse that we’re emitting so much. If that number were higher, human contributions wouldn’t mean a whole lot, but since a very small amount has a profound effect on temperature, he’s actually making the opposite case he believes he is. But I wouldn’t expect the people railing against climate change on the Forbes YouTube channel to understand something as complex as… 5th grade percentages.