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More climate fear-mongering

This article from the journal Nature yesterday, Climate change could flip Mediterranean lands to desert, about a new Science journal paper, is very typical of too much of the climate research and reporting these days.

First, they outline the coming and certain disaster:

Maintaining the historic ranges of the region’s ecosystems would require limiting warming to just 1.5 ºC, by making substantial cuts to the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, the analysis concludes. Otherwise, the vegetation and ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin will shift as temperatures rise. Increasing desertification in southern Europe is just one of the changes that would result. “Everything is moving in parallel. Shrubby vegetation will move into the deciduous forests, while the forests move to higher elevation in the mountains,” says Joel Guiot, a palaeoclimatologist at the European Centre for Geoscience Research and Education in Aix-en-Provence, France, and lead author of the study.

Then they point out the necessary political solution, which of course requires us to agree to an odious international agreement that will limit our individual freedoms and give more power to international governments:

“I like that they’re doing this comparison across different warming scenarios in line with the Paris agreement, to start to gauge the sensitivity to them,” says Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. The study confirms the vulnerability of many ecosystems, and could guide policymakers’ efforts to help natural systems adapt to climate change, says Patrick Gonzalez, principal climate-change scientist at the US National Park Service based at the University of California, Berkeley. “This study shows how essential it is for nations to meet their Paris commitments.”

Only at the very end of the article, almost as an aside, do they note these inconvenient facts about the limitations of the paper (which also happens to be based entirely on computer models):

Both the climate and vegetation models have significant uncertainties, however, and the models can account only for natural vegetation, rather than managed vegetation such as forests and crops. The study ignores the fact that humans continually affect ecosystems through land-use change, urbanization and soil degradation.

Meanwhile, I have been spending my spare time reading a 1,078 page report called Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, which outlines in incredible detail the research that has been going on for the past thirty years on the actual effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant life. This vast research, which can be read here, has essentially found that the effects of increased CO2 are almost all positive, across the board. To quote just the first five key findings of the first chapter, “Carbon dioxide, plants, and soils”:

  • Results from 3,586 separate experimental conditions conducted on 549 plant species reveal nearly all plants will experience increases in dry weight or biomass in response to atmospheric CO 2 enrichment. Results from an additional 2,094 separate experimental conditions conducted on 472 plant species reveal nearly all plants will experience increases in photosynthesis in response to atmospheric CO 2 enrichment.
  •  

  • Long-term CO 2 enrichment studies confirm the findings of shorter-term experiments, demonstrating the effects of elevated atmospheric CO 2 likely persist across plant lifetimes.
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  • Several studies indicate plants are not harmed by super-elevated atmospheric CO 2 concentrations an order of magnitude or more greater than the globe’s current mean. Instead, positive growth responses are reported, some of which are particularly large. Most plants will display enhanced rates of photosynthesis and biomass production as the atmosphere’s CO 2 concentration rises.
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  • Forest growth rates throughout the world have increased over the years in concert with, and in response to, the historical increase in the air’s CO 2 concentration. As the atmosphere’s CO 2 concentration continues to rise, forests likely will respond by exhibiting significant increases in biomass production, and thus they likely will grow more robustly and significantly expand their ranges, as is already being documented in many parts of the world.
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  • Where tropical forests have not been decimated by the targeted and direct destructive actions of people, such as the felling and burning of trees, forest productivity has been growing with the passing of time, rising with the increasing CO 2 content of the air. It has been doing so despite changes in atmospheric, soil, and water chemistry, including twentieth century global warming, which IPCC claims to have been unprecedented over the past one to two millennia.

There’s more. Anyone who has the time and is interested in the study of climate should take a look. It doesn’t try to prove that global warming is or is not happening. It only looks to see what the effects of increased carbon dioxide will have on life on Earth. And it finds that these effects mostly beneficial.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

One comment

  • Edward

    Robert wrote: “Meanwhile, I have been spending my spare time reading a 1,078 page report called Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, which outlines in incredible detail the research that has been going on for the past thirty years on the actual effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant life.”

    Has there been any research on the actual ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin during the Medieval Warming Period of 1,000 years ago, when temperatures were warmer than they are today? This may give a better indication of the actual environment than the guesses that were made by the Science models used to make the climate modelers report.

    Since various governments are concerned about controlling climate and its effects, we could (should?) ask which climate is the correct climate for the Earth and humanity, and ponder how to choose the correct one. Today’s climate? The climate of 1992, (which I chose due to the goals of the Kyoto convention)? The climate of 1850, before industrialization started “carbonizing” the atmosphere? The climate of the Little Ice Age (whose low temperatures we are still climbing out of — you know, a natural global warming after the natural global cooling)? The climate of the Medieval Warming Period, which immediately preceded the Little Ice Age? The climate of 4,500 years ago, when the pyramids at Giza were built (before the Sahara moved northward and buried most of the out-structures associated with these pyramids)? The climate of the midst of any glacial period of the Ice Age (which is the climate that the Earth has had most, over the past few million years)?

    And isn’t it unnatural for us to mess with the Earth’s natural changes in climate through such climate agreements as Kyoto and Paris?

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