Energy Probe

(Dec. 12, 2009) Western carbon dioxide emissions increase plant yields in the Third World. So why are they asking for reparations?

At Copenhagen, Third World countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations from the West for the consequences of the West’s fossil fuel burning, among them droughts and crop failures.

Third World countries have it backwards. The West’s CO2 emissions have been increasing crop yields while helping to ease the Third World’s water shortages. Rather than plead for reparations, Third World governments should offer a paean to Providence.

The bureaucrats at Copenhagen dread high CO2 levels. The biosphere craves them. Plants evolved when CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood at a healthy 1000 parts per million, two-to-three times today’s paltry level of about 380 parts per million. Plants crave CO2 so much that commercial greenhouse operators often enrich greenhouse air with CO2 — also known as nature’s fertilizer — to levels of 1500 parts per million, or four times that of our current atmosphere.

 Since humans began adding CO2 to the planet’s atmosphere, taking plants off their starvation rations by creating a planet-wide greenhouse, plants have thrived. Data from NASA satellites, which since the early 1980s have been tracking the amount of biota on Earth, vividly demonstrate the results. As CO2 emissions grew in leaps and bounds, so did plants — the data shows planet Earth is now greener than when those satellite measurements began.

 Growth in greenery varies from country to country, and within countries, because climatic factors are so many and so varied, but the overall trend is clear, and especially in the Third World. The Indian subcontinent, the Amazon, the tropical countries generally, all show marked improvement, with studies pointing to improvements in carbon dioxide levels as an important factor.

 China, which includes some of the most resource-stretched regions on the planet, provides the most dramatic demonstration of the boon in biota. As shown in a 2007 analysis by academics at the country’s prestigious Beijing Normal University, China’s plant growth increased by an astounding 24 % over the 18-year period studied, 1982 to 1999. The Chinese analysis, which like many others was based on satellite data, notes that China’s resource-constrained regions sometimes did particularly well. In water-constrained Northwest China, for example, plant growth increased by 29%. In Northeast China and the Tibetan Plateau, where temperatures ordinarily place severe limits on vegetation, plant growth increased by 30%. South China and East China, where sunlight is a limiting factor, saw plant growth increase by a still-impressive 19%. Changes in CO2 during those 18 years correlated well with the changes in vegetation.

 That plants love CO2 comes as no surprise — CO2 is not only their food, it is a gas to which they are superbly adapted. When the air is rich in CO2, plants don’t need to work as hard to breathe it in, letting them reduce the number of stomata, or air pores, on the surfaces of their leaves. Fewer pores means the plants breathe out less water vapour, letting them conserve moisture and better survive droughts. CO2 also helps plants survive droughts and other adverse conditions by extending their root systems, allowing them to collect minerals and moisture from afar. Through other mechanisms, CO2 protects plants against insect infestations, soil salinity and other environmental threats.

 This gas — also known as the gas of life — is healthful and helpful to humans, too. CO2 not only boosts agricultural yields, it boosts the antioxidant and vitamin content in plants, as well as their essential minerals. Also importantly, CO2 helps make hospitable marginal areas of the world that would otherwise be inhospitable.

Industrialization in the West, along with the fossil fuel burning that it has entailed, has been a win for the West and a win for the world, including the Third World. The colourless, odourless, tasteless gas called CO2 is indispensable to life and, because China and India are certain to rapidly increase their CO2 emissions, the world will soon be getting more of it. They say you can have too much of a good thing. With CO2, the science tells us, the planet is far, far away from reaching its cornucopia potential.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Sources for this column: 

Comprehensive analysis of the impact of climatic changes on Chinese terrestrial net primary productivity

A signal of increased vegetation activity of India from 1981 to 2001 observed using satellite – derived fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation

CLIMATE CHANGE — Statement of William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University

Competing roles of rising CO2 and climate change in the contemporary European carbon balance

December 5, 2009

Margaret Thatcher: Speech to Conservative Party Conference 1988 Oct 14

Margaret Thatcher: Speech to United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment)1989 Nov 8

Margaret Thatcher: Speech to the Royal Society 1988 Sep 27

Understanding and Attributing Climate Change

Observations — Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change

Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes — a new dataset from 1850

(Dec. 5, 2009) The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data. Continue reading →

David Solway
mensnewsdaily.com
December 3, 2009

Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs. The evidence for data tampering and all manner of hocus-pocus was available some time ago for anyone who cared to look.

There is a rapidly growing adversarial bibliography on the subject of climate change which anyone interested in the global warming controversy might do well to consult. A partial list would include: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery; An Appeal to Reason, by Nigel Lawson; Climate Confusion, by Roy Spencer; Meltdown, by Patrick Michaels; Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick; Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, by Ian Plimer; Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, by Steven Milloy; and The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon.

The authentic scientific expertise assembled in such books cannot honorably be ignored or discounted. The last chapter of William Gairdner’s Oh, Oh, Canada!, “Global Warming in a Nutshell,” should also be required reading. It is the most effective short account of the global warming swindle that I have yet come across. Global warmists, I might point out, are not known for playing fair. Lawrence Solomon, the subtitle of whose book is “The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud,” refers to himself as “the most disinvited speaker in Canada.” In an article for the National Post, he provides a list of debates and conventions to which he was invited and subsequently disinvited once his convictions became clear. This is not surprising since in the few global warming debates that have thus far been arranged, “the skeptics have won convincingly, leading most in the doomsayer camp to boycott any debate in the future.”

The fact is, as these writers have amply demonstrated, we have become the willing dupes of a pervasive deception. To mention only a few of the red flags that have recently sprung up: Not long ago, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York perpetrated an embarrassing error — if error it was. The institute, on whose statistical data the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) depends heavily for its reports, “typed in” the September 2008 temperatures for its October assessment, concluding that global warming had risen vertiginously. The finding was accepted in the major sites and media around the world as confirmation of the global warming dogma. The institute itself admitted that it does not conduct independent verification of the data it logs, regrettably rendering some or even many of its prognostications all but useless.

Frank Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, had some more intriguing news for us. The Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain “has begun to eliminate the daily temperature records from its public websites,” taking a page from the Goddard Institute, which has been deleting facts and figures unfavorable to the global warming hypothesis for some time now, as well as adding “corrections” to the data “to obtain global warming.” The big lie has reached the point where it must be maintained by the omission of details, the distortion of data, and the suspicious liability to error. And as we have seen, the plot thickened when the Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth. “Warmist scientists,” writes James Delingpole, may “have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.” Tipler has recently posted yet another convincing exposé outing the CRU’s counterfeit science, concluding that “most of the evidence for global warming was simply made up.” What we are hopefully observing is the unfolding of a major Climategate scandal.

Such practices, however, even after disclosure, do not seem to operate as a deterrent to persistence, and embarrassment is easily forgotten when there is a theory to uphold. Just as the Goddard Institute continues to abide by its errors, so does the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. This despite the fact that a faulty satellite sensor reading led it to estimate that the Arctic ice cap was receding dramatically — 500,000 square kilometers of lost ice covering an area considerably larger than California. While admitting its mistake, the NSIDC did not alter its view until April 2009, when it released a graph showing, in the words of Steven Goddard, that the Arctic ice cap had “actually increased by more than the size of Texas.” From the purported loss of California to the substantive acquisition of Texas represents a significant gain for the United Ice Fields of America.

Naturally, the mainstream media have not caught on as yet, or perhaps they simply refuse to acknowledge the evidence that would serve to discredit their years of advocacy and bring them into even greater disrepute than at present. For example, my local newspaper, the Montreal Gazette for November 25, 2009, banners “Prognosis on Climate Change Is Grim,” and retails bogus data, such as “the stunning retreat of the Arctic sea ice” as well as rising temperatures and sea levels, which have been reliably challenged by a host of credible agencies, organizations, and leading scientists. The only thing that is “stunning” is the sheer duplicity of such claims. There is — big surprise! — no reference whatsoever to the damning leaks in the climate warming dikes that threaten to flood the field of study. As the pressure continued to mount, however, the same newspaper for November 28 reprinted two articles side by side, one mentioning the email controversy but soft-pedaling its consequences, the other citing the already-exploded “unprecedented meltdown” data from the NSIDC.

The global warming movement most likely did not begin as a deliberate, well-organized scam, but as an expression of genuine concern by people of good intentions. But it was soon amplified by pseudo-religious zealots with a passionate animus against the free enterprise system, such as Canada’s David Suzuki, and eventually hijacked by unscrupulous entrepreneurs intent on abusing the free enterprise system to their own advantage, such as Al Gore. David Suzuki appears to believe what he says, carefully selecting data to reinforce a position in which he has invested emotionally. Al Gore plainly does not believe what he says or practice what he preaches, often falsifying his data to strengthen a project in which he has invested financially. A UK court ruled that his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, contains at least nine salient falsehoods and could not be shown in classrooms without a prior disclaimer. Gore earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Then there is the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in which Gore is a partner. KPCB has just floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” — the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an “oil wildcatter,” which is about as non-green as one can get.

In any event, it wasn’t long before governments, interested corporations, and the United Nations completed the travesty. The payoff for governments involved increased control over the private lives of their citizens, using the environmental scare to further their statist agenda. Companies saw new scope for enormous profits deriving from ventures in the cap-and-trade market and so-called “clean energy” alternatives. The United Nations recognized a golden opportunity to effect a massive transfer of wealth from the industrialized Western nations to the third world in various forms of carbon subsidies.

The long-term result is not hard to see: the growing infringement on personal liberties to the convenience of the state, the enrichment of shrewd individuals and energy consortiums coupled with the gradual impoverishment of punitively taxed Western electorates, and the hypothetical solvency of corrupt, backward, and inefficient third world countries at the expense of the developed world, except for the parasites and scavengers — those whom UK science advisor Lord Christopher Monckton bluntly calls “criminals” — whose fiscal and professional bolsters would be secure.

All this should be obvious to anyone willing to undertake a little impartial research. What is most alarming, however, is the extent to which the Western public has allowed itself to be bamboozled, conscripted into the cause, and, in effect, brainwashed. It is as if we are witnessing something like a collective hallucination at work, a mass psychosis not structurally different from the apocalyptic movements and revolutionary millenarianism of the medieval world analyzed by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. Only the initiating gradients are different.

For we have been pampered by the freedom, comparative prosperity, and multiplying amenities of a productive society the likes of which has never been seen before. We have too much time on our hands, more “life-enhancing” devices, services, inventions, medications, and pharmaceuticals than most of us know what to do with, more leisure than any previous culture has been able to afford its members, entertainment choices that leave us bewildered before their unstinting profusion, greater abundance in our food marts than probably all the granaries of the past combined — so that, inevitably, we have become a vast community of unthinking consumers spared the upheavals, scarcities, invasions, disruptions, and perpetual violence that has, until very recently, characterized life on the planet, as it still does in less fortunate regions of the globe.

Like the generation prior to the First World War, we have grown bored, stupefied with excess, ignorant of the blessings of plenty from which we have benefited, loath to engage in the quotidian struggle for normal existence or defend the ramparts of the “city upon a hill.” We have, in short, grown personally and culturally debilitated, a gaggle of effeminate narcissists determined to save the world but who cannot even save themselves. The upshot is baldly predictable. Having taken this rare interregnum in the war of survival for granted, we have become restless and dissatisfied, and find ourselves prone to every passing infatuation that promises a species of redemption from our own inner nullity. And environmentalism has arrived as the religion du jour to give substance and significance to the emptiness within, to rescue a cosseted populace from the apathy, lassitude, and cultural ennui that has descended upon it — and, of course, rendered it progressively exploitable by venal and power-hungry elites.

Meanwhile, from Kyoto to Copenhagen and whatever comes next, “we lay waste our powers,” to cite the poet Wordsworth in a context opposite to the one which he imagined, “we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” The lemming reflex may now be undeflectable. And our competitors in the international arena, who have no intention of abiding by or even signing on to international protocols and agreements in order “to save the planet,” cannot believe their luck. The Chinese are rubbing their hands with glee. The Russians are chortling in their vodka. The Indians are performing namesté in a gesture of ineffable gratitude. Latin-American caudillos and African dictators are contemplating their numbered accounts and salivating.

The climate warming thesis has about the same degree of validity as the plot of the Hollywood SF clunker The Arrival, in which space aliens land on earth and begin heating up the atmosphere by generating greenhouse gases to accommodate their biology. Those of us who have paid attention know we have been fed a line. The question is whether people will awaken in time and put an end to this insidious design — for that is what it truly is — against our welfare and very preservation, or whether we will continue to acquiesce in the end of our privileged and hard-earned “lifeworld” as we know it.