CO2 is patently different. It’s invisible, odourless and non-toxic. Unlike the kind of noxious substances an ordinary person would consider ‘pollution’, it’s not inherently bad. Our problems are not caused by CO2 itself, but rather by the quantity of CO2. If a diabetic dies from too much sugar, that doesn’t make sugar a poison.

Similarly, the term ‘pollution’ suggests a foreign substance sullying an otherwise pure and unspoilt environment. The effects of a chemical spill, for example, are very clealy seen within a specific geographical area, with the source of the pollution close-by.

CO2 is different- it’s distributed across our atmosphere, and the relationship between excessive CO2 emissions and its consequences is often far from obvious and separated by thousands of miles.

You can’t gloss over those differences- even your dumbest opponent knows that CO2 doesn’t look or behave like pollution. That’s where all this ‘CO2 is plant food’ bull comes from- our attempts to patronise.

The author is definitely right in that we need to take another look at the conceptual underpinnings of what we’re trying to do, as well as the language we use to describe those concepts. But re-branding CO2 as pollution seems to to me to be a blind alley.

I’m more inclined to go with Nordhaus and Shellenger’s analysis. In their excellent book ‘Break through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility’, they spend an entire chapter explaining why we need to get away from, not closer to, the pollution paradigm:
http://books.google.com/books?id=xNJtkLxTpekC&lpg=PP1&ots=aKQTbo-j6W&dq=nordhaus%20environmentalism%20pollution%20emissions&pg=PA113#v=snippet&q=pollution%20paradigm&f=false

What’s needed is not a pollution paradigm that hinges on ideas of human restraint, of carbon counting and greenhouse gas reduction, because the truth is, it ain’t ever going to sell outside of the middle class, let alone in China.

Instead, we need a story that speaks of human optimism and opportunity unleashed- one that calls for us to tap into humanity’s endless resources of innovation, imagination and enterprise in order to abandon the failed solutions of the past and embrace the opportunities of the clean energy economy.

Seriously, there are more and more scientific evidence pointing to other directions than CO2. It is already possible to explain many of the most critical climate criteria without always using CO2 as a climate driver.

Take a look at these late scientific references. They are written by people outside “the AGW rescure team” (i.e Hansen,Jonea,Santer, Mann, Annan, Schmidt et al.) and are both putting CO2 in the periphery. It is not a dominant factor at all.

http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx?FileName=NS20101100004_10739704.pdf&paperID=3217

http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=3447&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=ijg13&utm_campaign=01

That’s what the EPA’s GHG endangerment finding was all about. Fossil-based GHG emissions are now officially “pollution”.

The caveat is that not all GHGs are pollution, for example it’s not “pollution” for you to exhale. But in the most-common context, that of industrial, commercial, or residential emissions, “GHG pollution” is the best descriptor.