(See also: screenshots.)
"A Veteran Scientist Dreams Boldly Of 'Earth And Sky'"
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/02/403530867/a-veteran-scientist-dreams-boldly-of-earth-and-sky
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=403530867#comment-2005096894
Prof. Freeman Dyson is not just a "veteran scientist" or "one of the most famous names in science." He is, arguably, America's most illustrious living scientist. He inherited Albert Einstein's old job at Princeton.
The fertilization effect of additional CO2 on plant growth is very beneficial. That's why Scientific American called anthropogenic CO2 the "precious air-fertilizer" (back when their standards were higher).
http://tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2
Prof. Dyson says, "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it's a real plus to burn coal and oil."
http://pages.citebite.com/n1v3s5u9a2fex
In a private email conversation he agreed with my contention that 15% is a conservative estimate.
Hundreds of studies over the last century have proven that additional CO2 is dramatically beneficial to nearly all plants. For most plants, under the most common conditions, CO2 is the limiting factor for growth. That's why CO2 levels are measured in parts-per-million, in an atmosphere with 21% free Oxygen: because carbon-hungry living things used up all the CO2.
Obviously if there's not enough light, or not enough water (though elevated CO2 helps with drought tolerance too), or not enough of some essential nutrient for a plant, that can become a limiting factor in a particular situation. But, overall, the major limiting factor for plant growth on planet Earth is the chronic shortage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Levels of CO2 far beyond what we will ever be able to achieve in the ambient atmosphere are highly beneficial for plant growth, which is why most commercial greenhouses use CO2 generators to keep CO2 at 3x to 4x ambient levels, at significant expense. They spend the money to keep CO2 levels high because that dramatically improves productivity.
Unfortunately, ambient CO2 levels will never get anywhere near that high. Right now, ambient CO2 averages 0.04% by volume. It might get up to 0.06% someday (though not in our lifetimes), if mankind is fortunate.
Have you ever wondered about the high levels of free oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere?
On Venus and Mars nearly all the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of CO2. Free oxygen (O2) is nearly non-existent, because it is highly reactive, and combines with other elements to make less-reactive, more stable molecules, like CO2, H2O, SO2, etc. On Venus and Mars nearly all the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of CO2.
But on Earth, 99.8% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of O2, and only 0.04% is in CO2, even though fires and animal respiration are constantly producing CO2 from O2.
At ground level, there's an average of about 25 times as many H2O molecules in the air as CO2 molecules. Plants need both, but few plants bother to get the water they need from the air.
Why do you think those things are true?
Why do you think that, although 21% of the Earth's atmosphere is O2, CO2 levels are measured in mere parts-per-million? What causes CO2 levels to be so low in the Earth's atmosphere, when they are so high in the atmospheres of Venus and Mars? Have you ever wondered why?
The correct answer is that it's because CO2-hungry living things have stripped nearly all the CO2 from the atmosphere, to get the carbon, releasing the O2 as a waste product. That's why, although 21% of the Earth's atmosphere is oxygen, CO2 levels are measured in mere parts-per-million.
The CO2Science web site has a huge catalog of studies of the effects of CO2 on plant growth, here:
http://www.cO2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
The studies show that nearly all plants benefit dramatically from elevated CO2 levels.
Moreover, there's good evidence that many of those studies underestimate the benefit of elevated CO2:
http://www.cO2science.org/subject/f/summaries/faceartifacts.php
The first such study that I'm aware of was done nearly a century ago, in Germany. Scientific American wrote about it in 1920:
http://tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2
Prof. Dyson's wisdom and independence are unusual in academia, but in the broader scientific community, outside the cloistered confines of academia and government institutions, skepticism of climate alarmism runs wide and deep. Most privately-employed "real world" geophysical scientists are not climate alarmists:
http://tinyurl.com/clim97pct
31,487(!!) American scientists (including engineers in relevant disciplines) have signed the "Oregon Petition," signifying their agreement with this statement:
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
[*** It didn't go into moderation, but they nevertheless deleted it ***]
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=403530867#comment-2005118181
Why do climate activists have such disdain for the truth? The best evidence is that anthropogenically caused warming of the climate is modest and benign. There's not even a consensus among scientists that it is significant, let alone harmful. When Harris polled 500 leading American Meteorological and Geophysical scientists, they found nothing resembling a consensus. Harris found that:
“97% agree that 'global average temperatures have increased' during the past century. But not everyone attributes that rise to human activity. A slight majority (52%) believe this warming was human-induced, 30% see it as the result of natural temperature fluctuations and the rest are unsure.”
http://tinyurl.com/clim97pct
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=403530867#comment-2000553903
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=403530867#comment-2005219780
John Samuel asked, "Please produce evidence of a pause."
Here are the two main satellite temperature indexes for the last 18 years, graphed together:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997.0/plot/uah/from:1997.0/offset:1/
Neither of them show a clear long-term trend, either up or down.
If you do linear regression, you can detect a slight upward trend in UAH, while RSS shows an even slighter downward trend (almost flat):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997.0/plot/uah/from:1997.0/offset:1/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/uah/from:1997.0/offset:1/trend
But in both cases, the apparent trend is much smaller than the error bars, which means there's really no detected trend, either up or down:
RSS: http://www.sealevel.info/uyork_rss_1997.0-2015.3.png
UAH: http://www.sealevel.info/uyork_uah_1997.0-2015.3.png
(Source: http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html )
John also wrote, "The oceans... rise [at a rate of] 3.2 mm per year, up from 1.9 mm per year a century ago."
That's not true.
In the first place, it is wrong to speak of a single rate of sea-level rise, because it varies widely by location. In fact, in many places, sea-level is falling, rather than rising. The globally averaged rate of sea-level change is slightly positive (rising), but it hasn't increased in over 3/4 century.
It is also an error to conflate, as you have done, measurements of entirely different sorts in different locations at different times to create the appearance of accelerated sea-level rise when no such acceleration has actually been detected. Your "3.2 mm/yr" rate is from open-ocean measurements by satellite altimetry, inflated by Peltier's calculate adjustment to account for hypothesized sinking of the ocean basin. But all measurements from "a century ago" are from coastal tide gauges. They are not directly comparable. Neither coastal tide gauges nor satellites are showing acceleration (increase in rate) of sea-level rise.
That's the most important fact that everyone needs to understand about sea-level rise: its rate has not accelerated at all in response to human greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of human GHG emissions have been since the 1940s. Since then, we've driven up CO2 from about 300 ppm to 400 ppm – yet the rate of sea-level rise hasn't increased at all.
This fact is a huge problem for the computer models that the IPCC relies on. Dr. Steven Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Obama's first term. After he left that position, he finally felt at liberty to tell the inconvenient truth. He said, “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”
And yet, the IPCC still relies on those models. They just can't accept the empirical fact that anthropogenic CO2 has very little effect on sea-level rise. They still base their sea-level projections on hypothetical extreme acceleration scenarios, which they claim will be caused by CO2 emissions, despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.
[Hold on, this is waiting to be approved by NPR Books.]
[*** They deleted it ***]
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=403530867#comment-2005229563 [reply to Gerald Wilhite]
Gerald, this might interest you. Prof. Happer taught a physics symposium at UNC in September, and I attended. No video recording was made of his lecture, but I made an audio recording, and Prof. Happer generously sent me his Powerpoint slides. I put both on my web site, so you can view the slides as you listen to his lecture.
http://www.sealevel.info/Happer_UNC_2014-09-08/
[almost identical to the first one they deleted]
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/02/403530867/a-veteran-scientist-dreams-boldly-of-earth-and-sky#comment-2005527610
Prof. Freeman Dyson is not just a "veteran scientist" or "one of the most famous names in science." He is, arguably, America's most illustrious living scientist. He inherited Albert Einstein's old job at Princeton.
The fertilization effect of additional CO2 on plant growth is very beneficial. That's why Scientific American called anthropogenic CO2 the "precious air-fertilizer" (back when their standards were higher).
http://tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2
Prof. Dyson says, "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it's a real plus to burn coal and oil."
http://pages.citebite.com/n1v3s5u9a2fex
In a private email conversation he agreed with my contention that 15% is a conservative estimate.
Hundreds of studies over the last century have proven that additional CO2 is dramatically beneficial to nearly all plants. For most plants, under the most common conditions, CO2 is the limiting factor for growth. That's why CO2 levels are measured in parts-per-million, in an atmosphere with 21% free Oxygen: because carbon-hungry living things used up all the CO2.
Obviously if there's not enough light, or not enough water (though elevated CO2 helps with drought tolerance too), or not enough of some essential nutrient for a plant, that can become a limiting factor in a particular situation. But, overall, the major limiting factor for plant growth on planet Earth is the chronic shortage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Levels of CO2 far beyond what we will ever be able to achieve in the ambient atmosphere are highly beneficial for plant growth, which is why most commercial greenhouses use CO2 generators to keep CO2 at 3x to 4x ambient levels, at significant expense. They spend the money to keep CO2 levels high because that dramatically improves productivity.
Unfortunately, ambient CO2 levels will never get anywhere near that high. Right now, ambient CO2 averages 0.04% by volume. It might get up to 0.06% someday (though not in our lifetimes), if mankind is fortunate.
Have you ever wondered about the high levels of free oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere?
On Venus and Mars nearly all the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of CO2. Free oxygen (O2) is nearly non-existent, because it is highly reactive, and combines with other elements to make less-reactive, more stable molecules, like CO2, H2O, SO2, etc. On Venus and Mars nearly all the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of CO2.
But on Earth, 99.8% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is in the form of free oxygen, and only 0.04% is in CO2, even though fires and animal respiration are constantly producing CO2 from O2.
At ground level, there's an average of about 25 times as many H2O molecules in the air as CO2 molecules. Plants need both, but few plants bother to get the water they need from the air.
Why do you think those things are true?
Why do you think that, although 21% of the Earth's atmosphere is O2, CO2 levels are measured in mere parts-per-million? What causes CO2 levels to be so low in the Earth's atmosphere, when they are so high in the atmospheres of Venus and Mars? Have you ever wondered why?
The correct answer is that it's because CO2-hungry living things have stripped nearly all the CO2 from the atmosphere, to get the carbon, releasing the O2 as a waste product. That's why, although 21% of the Earth's atmosphere is oxygen, CO2 levels are measured in mere parts-per-million.
The CO2Science web site has a huge catalog of studies of the effects of CO2 on plant growth, here:
http://www.cO2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
The studies show that nearly all plants benefit dramatically from elevated CO2 levels.
Moreover, there's good evidence that many of those studies underestimate the benefit of elevated CO2:
http://www.cO2science.org/subject/f/summaries/faceartifacts.php
The first such study that I'm aware of was done nearly a century ago, in Germany. Scientific American wrote about it in 1920:
http://tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2
Prof. Dyson's wisdom and independence are unusual in academia, but in the broader scientific community, outside the cloistered confines of academia and government institutions, skepticism of climate alarmism runs wide and deep. Most privately-employed "real world" geophysical scientists are not climate alarmists:
http://tinyurl.com/clim97pct
31,487(!!) American scientists (including engineers in relevant disciplines) have signed the "Oregon Petition," signifying their agreement with this statement:
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
[*** They deleted it ***]
