Is more CO2 beneficial for Earth's ecosystems?
We should emit as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as possible and oppose efforts to regulate CO2 emissions, because more CO2 is good for the Earth. That's the take-home message of an audacious TV ad that was run this fall by the advocacy group, CO2isgreen.com. "Higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems, and support more plant and animal life", the ad proclaims.
It's the brainchild of H. Leighton Steward, a retired oil industry executive, and Corbin J. Robertson, Jr., chief executive and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, a Houston-based owner of coal resources that lets other companies mine, in return for royalties. According to an article in the Washington Post, the ad ran this fall in New Mexico and Montana, which have key Congressmen that CO2isgreen.com hopes to sway. The ads form part of a major PR campaign being waged by the fossil fuel industry and its allies in advance of the crucial U.N. Climate Change Conference, which will be held December 7 - 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark. At that meeting, the leaders of the world will gather to negotiate an agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement will be the world's road map for dealing with climate change, and the stakes are huge.
Figure 1. Screen shot of the new ad by the advocacy group CO2isgreen.com.
Let's consider the scientific accuracy of the ad's three main points:
1) "Congress is considering a law that would classify CO2 as pollution. This will cost us jobs".
Well, this is a reasonable concern. Fossil fuels represent the foundation upon which modern civilization is built. The marvelous inventions of civilized life that have brought increased health, lifespan, and prosperity to billions of people are largely due to the use of fossil fuels. Regulating CO2 and moving to non-fossil fuel based energy sources won't be cheap or easy, and there is a potential for significant economic harm if our politicians bungle the job. The fossil fuel industry employs millions of people, and some of these jobs will no doubt be lost as new "green" energy sources are developed. However, the longer-term economic benefits of moving to a less fossil fuel-intensive economy, plus the jobs created as a result, must be weighed against the shorter term economic disruption that may occur.
2) "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 is a pollutant".
Webster's dictionary defines a pollutant as "man-made waste that contaminates an environment". Webster's defines "contaminate" as "to make inferior or impure". CO2 is man-made waste, and there is scientific evidence that added CO2 can make our atmosphere "inferior" to its present state, or else the EPA would not be considering regulations. As just one example, when CO2 is dissolved in the oceans, the water grows more acidic. Corals and other creatures that build shells out of calcium carbonate cannot form their shells if the acidity passes a critical level--their shells will dissolve. Thus, for these organisms, CO2 is definitely a pollutant. Several shell-building planktonic organisms, such as coccolithophorids, pteropods, and foraminifera, form an important basis of the food chain in cold ocean waters, and the continued increase in CO2 emissions have many scientists very concerned about a collapse of the oceanic food chain in these regions in coming decades. Presumably, CO2isgreen.com is taking the very narrow view that a pollutant is something that harms human health when breathed. The more important question is, how does CO2 emitted by fossil fuel generation, plus all the effects that come with it, impact human health and the health of Earth's ecosystems?
3) "Higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems, and support more plant and animal life".
It is true that many plants grow faster under enhanced CO2--the so-called "CO2 fertilization effect". Just ask your neighborhood commercial indoor marijuana grower, who probably grows his or her plants in an enhanced CO2 environment. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report found that crop yields under unstressed conditions increased by 0 - 25% for a doubling of CO2, and that growth of young tree stands also increased. However, the IPCC noted that ground level ozone pollution will limit the CO2 fertilization effect. Ozone pollution is caused by emissions from fossil fuel burning, and will increase in a warmer world since the chemical reactions that create ozone act more efficiently at higher temperatures. Furthermore, the higher temperatures, increased drought, and increased insect pests that added CO2 is likely to bring to the atmosphere via greenhouse effect warming will induce major stresses to plants that will counteract the CO2 fertilization effect. A 2009 paper by Battisti and Naylor in Science titled, "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat", reported that the 2003 heat wave in Europe--featuring temperatures predicted to be the norm by the end of the century--reduced harvests of fruits and grains by 21 - 36%. The 2007 IPCC report noted, "even slight warming decreases yields in seasonally and low latitude regions". Most of the world's population at risk of starvation live in such regions (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa).
To get more CO2 in the air, we have to mine, transport, and burn fossil fuels, and potentially fight wars to protect them. This creates a host of effects highly detrimental to people and ecosystems:
1) Particle pollution, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides emitted as a result of burning coal and operating motor vehicles cause over $118 billion in health and other damages per year in the U.S., according to a Congressionally-ordered National Academy of Sciences study released last month. The study said this was a "substantial underestimate", as it did not consider climate change-related costs, or pollution emissions from a wide variety of other sources.
2) Oil and natural gas drilling and oil spills have had catastrophic effects on many ecosystems over the past century, and will continue to do so. Coal mining via mountaintop removal has laid waste to vast regions of the Appalachians, obliterating over 700 miles of rivers and streams. Failures of slurry ponds dams such as the one that failed in December 2008 in Tennessee have contaminated numerous ecosystems, and killed hundreds (the Buffalo Creek, WV dam failure of 1972 killed 125, and a 1966 slurry pond dam failure in Aberfan, Wales killed 144, including 126 schoolchildren). The Physicians for Social Responsibility put out a report this week called Coal's Assault on Human Health that details many more examples of how coal is bad for ecosystems and human health.
3) Coal mining accidents killed 65 miners in the U.S. in 2006, and kill tens of thousands of miners worldwide each year (China has averaged 6,000 deaths per year this decade). Tens of thousands of miners contract black lung disease each year, as well.
The Greening of Planet Earth
Fossil fuel industry-funded Public Relations campaigns focusing on the benefits of CO2 for life on Earth are nothing new. In 2006, I blogged about a TV ad run by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) that proclaimed, "as for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.". In 1991, coal giant Western Fuels founded an organization called "The Greening Earth Society" which spent $250,000 to produce the video, "The Greening of Planet Earth" (available on Youtube). The 30-minute movie features scientists who describe in glowing terms the tremendous increases in plant growth that will occur due to increased CO2. Set to appropriately stirring music, the movie concludes: "The future also holds great promise. And contributing to this promise is the positive effect that carbon dioxide has upon our world. Crop plants will continue to grow more productively, contributing to ever-greater supplies of food. Forests will extend their ranges. Grasses will grow where none grow now. And great tracts of barren land we be reclaimed. In fact, it is not inconceivable that the vitality of our biosphere could rise by a full order of magnitude over the next few centuries, to a new, greening Planet Earth". According to Boston Globe investigative reporter Ross Gelbspan in his book The Heat is On, the movie was shown extensively in Washington D.C. and in the capitals of OPEC nations, and was the favorite movie of President George H.W. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu. It's interesting to note that The Greening Earth Society shares the same mailing address and fax number as the Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a fossil fuel industry front group that was given $35 million to fight climate change regulation in 2008. According to the creators of desmogblog.com, a website dedicated to "Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science", that money, plus an extra $5 million, was shuffled to a new industry front group called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), and used to help fund the "Clean Coal" TV ads that dominated the airwaves during the November 2008 election. The details are in the excellent new book, Climate Cover-up, written by desmogblog.com co-founder James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.
Commentary
The CO2isgreen.com ad is beautifully produced, with multiple windows depicting flowing pictures of flowers blooming, animals grazing, crops growing, and the sun shining over these grand scenes of nature's bounty, all set to the soothing sound track of some slick New Age music. Who wouldn't want to live in such a world? Unfortunately, this is a fantasy world created by fossil fuel industry Public Relations people, and we live in the real world where physics and science rule. Oil is not clean, coal is worse, and the extraction, transportation, and burning of fossil fuels that accompany the enhanced-CO2 world we live in are already causing massive environmental destruction. Add in the immense environmental damage likely to occur as a result of the coming climate change storm, and the fantasy that more CO2 will be good for the world dissolves into a nightmare for a huge proportion of Earth's ecosystems--and the people who depend upon them for life.
Hacked emails purport to show climate scientists' cover-up
A hacker broke into an email server at the Climate Research Unit of the UK's University of East Anglia this week and posted ten years worth of private email exchanges between leading scientists who've published research linking humans to climate change. Realclimate.org has an interesting response to the debacle, saying the emails are a "presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12)". They show one example of a "cherry-picked" distortion of one of the emails that global warming contrarians are using to try to discredit the science of climate change, and successfully refute the distortion, in my mind. The realclimate groups adds:
"More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period", no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no "marching orders" from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn't much to it".
There's not a person alive who would not look bad if their private emails made public, taken out of context, and subjected to attack. The reputations of all the scientists involved will suffer, as will understanding of the science of climate change. Global warming contrarians have not been able to effectively dispute the reality of human-caused climate change by publishing peer-reviewed scientific articles, so they've done what any effective (and unethical) politician would do--resort to personal attacks of dubious merit on their opponents, in an attempt to muddy the waters and distract people from the facts. That's politics, and it's not too surprising to see this sort of ugly episode in a game where the stakes are so high.
None of the so-called "smoking gun" emails the contrarians are excited about change what I pointed out in in my previous post: Arctic sea ice was at a new record low this month, human-emitted greenhouse gases are largely to blame, and the polar ice cap is expected to melt by 2030, throwing the climate into a dangerous new unstable mode.
I'll have a new post on Monday.
Jeff Masters
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Impressive winds being reported off the coast with some of the platforms gusting to over 60mph. Winds gusted to 40mph at Eagle Point this morning and near 40mph at Freeport.
Thanks, Doc!
Hi, 789, you saw this (below) already, maybe? I posted similar on previous blog.
Some State Emergency Management sites (like Virginia's) have the best current situation reports; some don't.
[& Atmo, thnks. I left post on previous blog. Always seems I'm caught mid-typing when there's a new blog.]
Gov. proclaims disaster in southeast Nebraska
by North Platte Bulletin Staff - 11/19/2009
Gov. Dave Heineman signed a state disaster declaration Thursday after a severe winter storm hit southeast Nebraska early this week.
The storm produced high winds and heavy wet snow in Gage, Jefferson, Nemaha, Pawnee, Richardson, and Thayer Counties.
Preliminary damage estimates total more than $3 million, according to the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency.
Nearly 500 residences were still without power late Thursday, according to news reports.
“High winds and heavy snow caused power lines to fall and power poles to break, along with significant damage to area roads and trees," said NEMA Assistant Director Al Berndt. "The extent of the damage means this will likely be a long-term process for these counties. We will work closely with local agencies to help move the recovery along.”
The disaster declaration makes state resources available to help with recovery. NEMA officials continue to work with local and county emergency managers to assess the scope of damage, and will coordinate with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to determine whether thresholds for federal assistance have been met.
I wish we had Tim Horton's in the States. Baked beans and Do-nuts for breakfast, YUM.
I wonder if Canadian obesity rates are anywheres near our southern states...
To leave some nuggets for others, plus I have a limit to my time right now, I'll just pick out a couple...
Dr. M:Furthermore, the higher temperatures, increased drought, and increased insect pests
1. I thought the increase/decrease in droughts was largely indeterminable...even as per Dr. M posts.
2. If you do increase droughts, what does that condition do to most insects?
Dr. M:Oil and natural gas drilling and oil spills have had catastrophic effects on many ecosystems over the past century, and will continue to do so
And oil has beneficial effects and happens naturally, too. No, cannot find a university-related research article to that end at the moment, but that doesn't automatically mean it is false.
Here: Recent global estimates of crude-oil seepage rates suggest that about 47% of crude oil currently entering the marine environment is from natural seeps, whereas 53% results from leaks and spills during the extraction, transportation, refining, storage, and utilization of petroleum. The amount of natural crude-oil seepage is currently estimated to be 600,000 metric tons per year, with a range of uncertainty of 200,000 to 2,000,000 metric tons per year. Thus, natural oil seeps may be the single most important source of oil that enters the ocean, exceeding each of the various sources of crude oil that enters the ocean through its exploitation by humankind.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/bya6g7r7ceebanrl/
And the crude that does get into the oceans is broken down by microorganisms...that thrive when doing so. It has been seeping out of the ocean floor for millennia.
Overall, this is a one-sided post about a very slanted TV ad.
The system in the GOM is non-tropical in nature, and the waters in the northern GOM are too cold now to ignite or sustain any type of development.
CO2 is decidedly good for this planet. As our population grows, the need for more and more food will become paramount and having more CO2 to help make for robust plant growth is an absolute necessity.
It is our wanton waste of resources that will ultimately destroy us if we do not change our ways. AGW and CO2-Cap and Trade is a fraud perpetrated by the aristocracy to relieve us of our money. Without any education in AGW, Al Gore-secov has made himself a billionaire with the AGW boondoggle.
Having more efficient fuel consumption in our land transportation, reducing the amount of globetrotting using the airlines and encouraging the careful replacement of wasteful energy consumption is the only way to go. Instead of globetrotting, use the web to hold meetings, is one example that comes to mind.
After Hurricane Charlie, my sister who lives in Orlando had all of her appliances destroyed when the power company, using outside contractors, hooked her house up incorrectly and wired it so that the 110 V lines were actually 220 V instead. Television, stereo, stove, anything with a computer inside it was fried. Without even turning the appliances on!!
Want to save this planet, stop the widespread use of standby circuitry that allows a device to be 'instant on' and go back to 'off and on' and you will be surprised at how much will be saved.
I repeat...AGW is an Aristocracy based fraud whose only goal is to take your hard earned money and line their pockets. After all, they have to have some way to offset those punishing tax hikes don't they?
BBC picking up the story (tentatively)...
Hotair picking up the story...
Hadley CRU director (Phil Jones) says files look genuine...
Hadley CRU canceled all existing passwords...
UK Telegraph blog picks up story...
of course, this could all still be wrong...but, with each passing hour, more people will have egg on their faces if it is. time will tell...
Think I'll go out before all N'orEaster forecasts and hot air emissions of any kind wreck this nice streak. :)
Need to check on LST/Mr.&Mrs. Floodman, too.
All the graphics stay current as updated new comes out.....everyone have a good day and watch that developing NON-Tropical Low in the GOM.....severe weather is possible as it moves into Northern Florida and really watch it move up the East coast as a NorEaster. Peace, and No FIGHTING KIDS!
Yep i agree wether you agree with him or not. His deligence should be admired.
LOL
It's what we do here..
Relax and enjoy a Cold Fresca.
Area forecast discussion
National Weather Service New Orleans la
721 am CST Friday Nov 20 2009
Update...
sounding discussion...
The atmosphere remains dry and stable with a precipitable water
value of 0.57 inches and a lifted index value of 7.1. A large
surface inversion is present along with light and variable winds from
the surface up to 700 mb and out of the west aloft.
&&
Previous discussion... /issued 358 am CST Friday Nov 20 2009/
Discussion...
latest surface analysis continue to show a 1023mb high over
Tennessee Valley and an inverted trough from south Texas to
central Oklahoma. Northeast flow was noted over north central and
northeast Gulf. Upper air analysis showed the wave axis from the
Texas Panhandle to El Paso region. Infrared satellite imagery showed
convection along the Texas coast and from north central Texas to
the hills. Initial planer fields revealed decreasing Theta-E
values with height over the west Gulf and much of Texas ahead of
the wave. Isotach analysis at 250 revealed the southern stream of
100 to 110 knots at the base and back side of the wave. All in
all...an active 100 knot jet stream across Mexico to the north
Gulf to North Texas. Short and Middle Range models continue to push
the wave east through the next 36 hours becoming negatively tilted
from arklatex region to the forecast area by Saturday afternoon.
Surface low track continues across the south half of forecast
area...GFS is a little faster around Saturday afternoon while
European model (ecmwf) tracks the low across Saturday night. 00z sounding reveal a
strong inversion from 900 to 800mb and that inversion stays in
place through tonight. Theta-E decreasing with height will exist
above this layer for Saturday. In addition...the close proximity
of the upper level wave/low with a 500mb temperatures -14 to possibly
-18c across the area will yield a lapse rate supporting thunder.
However...we need surface base temperatures in the 70s and that air mass
will remain south of land areas Saturday...a few strong storms
may occur on coastal waters. Will carry isolated thunder Saturday
but most convection will remain near the coast Saturday. Will see
some clearing Sunday. A second system will affect the area with a
slight chance of rain Tuesday and another dry system for
Thursday...both will keep temperatures at or below norms for next week.
Relax and enjoy a Cold Fresca
Please make a effort to support the Portlight Honor Walks,..
People Helping people is always a good thing to support.
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