The Planet Earth: Intelligent Design or Sh!tass Lucky?

My answer to the title question is simply, sh!tass lucky. Billions and billions of totally unrelated and directly connected events conspired to result in one place among billions and billions that was able to sustain life and billions of random chemical events resulted in life actually being created and adapting and getting more and more complex until we ended up with beings ordering "quad venti half caf breve no foam with whip two splenda stirred skinny three pump peppermint mochas" at Starbucks.

Who reading this wasn't affected by Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos (I even have a copy of the book) and his stories of "Billions and Billions" of stars with "Billions and Billions" of planets... We humans got the big door prize. If we weren't created, then there would be no one around to notice we're not here...

But what does this have to do with the politics of global warming? Not much.

Back to the regular programming.

Now that Trenberth's theory of all the heat caused by human greed being cooled off by the oceans is disproven (although the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics was a hint that it would be) what do we know about anthropogenic catastrophic global warming climate change?

Everyone - every climate skeptic and every alarmist - agrees that Greenhouse Gases warm the climate. Indeed, without GHGs we would be living (actually wouldn't be living) on a very cold marble indeed.

And some percentage of  people who look at the climate (pretty much 100% of whom make their living writing reports that prove the evil than men doeth) insist that increases in CO2 causes extreme global temperatures and even acts as an accelerant. (I won't bother arguing against the fact that CO2 is benign and far more is produced naturally than by humans. Everyone knows that...)

But suppose that O2 IS poison and DOES result in runaway temperatures. Why have temperatures levelled off for almost two decades?

You guessed it.... Sh!tass luck.

It seems that there is some natural process that allows CO2 levels to increase - even double - and somehow not have any significant effect on global temperatures.

We're saved by billions and billions of sh!tty little lucky events