Update: The in-the-tank for the warmist AMS has scheduled a briefing ignoring the benefits that CO2 have provided but focusing on the false claims that CO2 will cause crop issues - continuing the indoctrination campaign the societies, enviro groups, universities riding the green grant gravy train like Yale, GMU, PSU, Columbia, Harvard and of course the lamestream media. Please consider writing them and telling the, what you think: Here is the e-mail we received.
Dear Colleagues,
The American Meteorological Society Policy Program, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America are pleased to invite you to a Capitol Hill Briefing on climate change and food security.
The briefing is open to the public and will take place from 3:00-4:00pm on January 20th. It will be in Room 485 of Senate Russell Office Building.
The briefing will feature:
Edward Carr, Director of International Development, Community, and Environment Department, Clark University
Bill Easterling, Dean, College of Earth and Mineral Science, The Pennsylvania State University
Cynthia Rosenzweig, Senior Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Climate change can affect food availability, access, and utilization, and the stability of each of these over time. Disruptions at any point can lead to food insecurity through the activities of the food system, including food production, transportation, and storage.
The briefing will explore the possible effects of climate change on domestic and international food security. The speakers will also discuss the recent report Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System, a peer-reviewed scientific assessment that identifies climate change effects on global food security.
Please RSVP to yseidgreen@ametsoc.org by January 18th, COB
----------
Paul Driessen
The heat is on! Not the unusual winter warmth in much of the United States - but the unrelenting heat generated by propaganda and pressure campaigns that the White House, EPA, Big Green and news media are unleashing in the wake of the Paris climate agreement...and as a prelude to the 2016 elections. Read Paul’s insightful analysis here.
-----------
Satellite data shows the per cent amount that foliage cover has changed around the world from 1982 to 2010.
Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilization, according to CSIRO research.
In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilization correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,” Dr Donohue said. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.
This, along with the vast extents of arid landscapes, means Australia featured prominently in our results.”
“While a CO2 effect on foliage response has long been speculated, until now it has been difficult to demonstrate,” according to Dr Donohue.
“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilisation effect by using mathematical modelling together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.”
The fertilization effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr. Donohue.
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.
“Ongoing research is required if we are to fully comprehend the potential extent and severity of such secondary effects.”
This study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal and was funded by CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.
Recently, President Obama scrapped the “97% consensus of scientists believe in climate change” claim - and raised it 99.5%:
While the president noted that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts [and] 99 percent of world leaders” agree human-caused climate change needs to be reckoned with.
If the President relied on facts rather than hyperbole, he would admit that there is no study claiming that 99.5% of scientists agree with the climate change thesis, and that even the study claiming a 97% consensus of scientists is total bunk.
The study reporting the 97% consensus, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” by John Cook and friends, under the halo of the University of Queensland was published in 2013 and, according to Watts Up With That, when the source data for the study was published online, the University of Queensland got so worried they threatened a lawsuit over use of Cook’s “97% consensus” data for a scientific rebuttal.
That threat is antithetical to the scientific method, which says that, for a study to be valid, it must be possible to repeat it and achieve the same results as the initial study. But, the University of Queensland is hiding the fact that Cook’s study was a qualitative study which relied on opinion and produced biased results.
Cook and his buddies looked at peer-reviewed studies and classified them as either agreeing or disagreeing with the climate change hypothesis. The 97% figure was really 97% of the hand-picked studies they reviewed. Even worse, investigative journalists at Popular Technology reported that the 97% Study falsely classifies scientists’ papers as supporting the global warming hypothesis - according to the scientists who published the papers.
Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified within Cook’s asserted 97 percent. The investigative journalists found Cook and his colleagues strikingly classified papers by such prominent, aggressive climate change skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as supporting the 97 percent consensus.
Cook and his colleagues, for example, classified a peer-reviewed paper by scientist Craig Idso as explicitly supporting the “consensus” position on global warming “without minimizing” the asserted severity of global warming. When Popular Technology asked Idso whether this was an accurate characterization of his paper, Idso responded:
“That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”
A more extensive examination of the Cook study by the New American reported that, out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That is less than 0.97%.
The crucial point here is the qualifying clause, “of those who have an opinion.” In other words, even the highly questionable Cook study doesn’t actually claim, as President Obama does, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree.” In fact, when examined closely, one finds that the study says only one-third of the authors of the published research papers they examined expressed an opinion that the Cook team interpreted as either an implicit or explicit endorsement of AGW. So now its 97 percent of one-third of selected scientists in a sampling of research papers. That’s a far cry from the 97 percent of all scientists claimed by President Obama and many of the media stories. And, as we will show below, even this admitted dramatically lower consensus claimed by the study is fraught with problems and falls apart further under examination.
Another criticism of the Cook’s paper is it didn’t define the “consensus” they were looking for. Is the 97% for people who believe the global warming is real, or people who believe it’s real and caused by mankind?
In fact popular technology listed 97 papers refuting Cook’s study here.
There are scientists, for example, who believe the Earth just went through a warming period caused by high sunspot activity. Many of those scientists blaming sunspots either work or consult for the U.S. or British Governments. Those scientists believe that we have entered a period of low sunspot activity and that might cause a mini-ice age.
Any objective examination of the data and methodology Cook and the University of Queensland have allowed the public to see will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact.
The ‘pause’ in global warming that this administration pressured NOAA to disavow is still present.
See the 64 theories for why temperatures have not risen for 18+ years.
The reality that intelligent people know is:
Here in his last Dragnet show, Jack Webb schools a young man on reality. It is obvious no one ever had that kind of talk with Obama or young people today who march and complain when we don’t respect their opinion or feelings.
This is from a 2007 post. it explains why nonsense stories dominate the news and media coverage. The environmental reporters already left leaning and tending to believe in environmental causes has pushed reporters to abandon objectivity in their coverage of the topic:
SOCIETY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM
This professional organization that prides itself in its Code of Ethics hosted a one-sided global warming session at its last annual event. The organization’s Code of Ethics includes among its stated principles: (1) Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting, (2) Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant, (3) Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
However, when the panel was confronted with the question of maintaining the balance between reporting the news and playing the role of advocacy journalist, Greenwald, one of the panelists, offered the standard talking points. “I think the facts are actually quite compelling,” Greenwald said. “We advocate one thing, but a lot of what we do is just report the fact… A lot of scientists worked on that question [if global warming was just natural] and did very sophisticated analysis that are sort of hard to explain because a lot of it is about pattern analysis and if you look at the pattern of global warming and try to find some sort of explanation, the only explanation that actually works for it is the greenhouse gases. We need help from journalists to explain to the public what is at stake and how we are going to be able to move forward.”
As Christopher Alleva in the American Thinker reported in an August 2007 article entitled ”Global Warming Propaganda Factory”.
“In January of this year, the SEJ published what they call Climate change: A guide to the information and disinformation. The guide is neatly organized into twelve chapters. Except for the seventh chapter titled with the freighted descriptive: “Deniers, Dissenters and Skeptics”, the guide is a one sided presentation that resoundingly affirms global warming and puts down anyone with a different point of view. The site is a virtual digest of the global warming industry. If you’re looking for a road map to the special interest groups behind the hysteria, this is the place to go. The journalist members of this association have obviously abandoned all pretense of objectivity.”
Back in the 1970s, the world was facing an energy crisis (Arab oil embargo) and the scientists, the government (CIA) and media were hyping the coming of the next ice age. Back then we had real pollution problems. Cars, homes and apartments, factories and power plants all were emitting real pollution into the air, and industry into the air, ground or water. The first environmentalists found a cause. I was one of them.
Many scientists were blaming the air pollution (called the ‘human volcano’ ) for the worrisome 1.35F cooling.
National Academy of Science Northern Hemisphere Temperatures
As an aside, NOAA made that cooling go away in the last 15 years gradually and low and behold instead of a cyclical change, we have more of a hockey stick and a greatly increased chance that every month and year will be the warmest ever or very close.
Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Reanalyzed
At the same time, some environmentalists warned millions would die as the exploding world population would deplete resources and lead to crop failures and massive starvation beginning in the 1980s even here in the United States.
Instead, thanks to exploration of energy and other resources and rapidly advancing technology, an explosion of industrialization improved the lives of Americans and billions in the west. We have in the last 4 decades, made huge progress in cleaning up the water and the air from particulates, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.
You may have seen stories of how China and India recently suffered from serious air pollution. They know that their rapid economic growth depends on cheap energy. In this story that I wrote last week, I explained here how this is like the west 60 years ago at the beginning of the post war boom. As their economies grow, they will make some of the same changes we made to improve their situation.
ATTENTION TURNS TO CARBON DIOXIDE
In the 1980s, global temperatures rebounded in the 60-year cycle seen back hundreds of years. Environmentalists and population control fanatics searched for blame, settling on fossil fuels and a new demon, carbon dioxide.
Is CO2 really a problem? No, for a lot of reasons. First of all it is a trace gas. When I give a talk and ask people how much of our air is CO2. I usually get answers like 30%, 50% or even higher numbers. The real answer is 0.04%. Yes, man through, respiration, burning fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production add CO2 but the natural cycles still dominate. The oceans are the greatest storehouse and source/sink of atmospheric CO2. The bubbles in cold, soda or champagne you enjoy is CO2. You know how these bubbles come out and the drink gets flat when it warms. The same happens in the oceans. On land, animals, and soils produce CO2 during respiration and CO2 and methane during their decomposition. Plants clearly play a key role in absorbing CO2.
Second, though CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is a minor one. Water vapor, which ranges up to 4% of our air by volume, accounts for over 97% of the greenhouse effect. You see the effect in summer when humid days are muggy and warm at night. Dry, warm days are more pleasant or even cool at night.
Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be a lot colder, and in places uninhabitable. The climate models have failed miserably because they overestimate CO2’s importance and ignore the sun and oceans, the real drivers. They projected major warming that has not occurred. The full earth coverage satellites tell us there has been no measurable warming globally for 18 years and 9 months now even as CO2 has increased 10%. Models projected a 1.3F warming in that period.
Enlarged
Routine claims of the ‘warmest ever’ is clearly shown by comparison to previous data sets to be due to massive data cooling of the past data not by your local hard working NWS but by a few ideologues at the National Climate Data Center controlled by the administration.
Greenhouse models tell us the warming should be greatest in the tropics but there has been no warming in the atmosphere or oceans there back to when satellite measurement began in 1979. Also the forecast increases in extremes have not materialized. Even though it may seem like it has in this internet and international media age where we see reports instantly on every storm or other natural catastrophic event.
I just finished authoring a paper with an Indian PhD climatologist from Canada showing how the only extreme that has really increased in any statistically significant way globally is winter cold and snow (remember the last few years?).
The reality is that carbon dioxide is a beneficial gas (too often people confuse it with the dangerous carbon monoxide). Plants use CO2 with water and nutrients from the ground and sunlight to produce plant cells and the fruits and vegetables and that feed us and the animals we eat. CO2 enriched plants are more vigorous and are drought resistant. Crop yields have increased three to five-fold at least in part due to this CO2 enrichment. Plant life emits oxygen, also critical for life as they remove more and more CO2.
CO2 levels are actually coming off the lowest levels in the entire history of the planet, just above the threshold for plant growth. It has been as much as 20 times higher over the last 650 million years.
But isn’t it harmful to our health? Not at all. Smogs and air quality events have become a rarity in the United States and soot and other small particulates have declined in half and are well below air quality standards. CO2 is not the problem. Every breath you take emits 100 times more CO2 than is in the air. In the classroom and your workplaces, CO2 concentrations reach levels 4 to 5 times higher than in the outside air. The ‘carbon pollution’ term refers to the soot that comes from the old dirty coal, once a problem here, now one in China and India.
The ecologist and former co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore talks about the hypocrisy of the CO2 demonization and other environmentalist lies in this powerful video and in his book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years. It may not feel like late December weatherwise east of the Rockies, but that is typical of stronger El Ninos, which get of to a notoriously late start but in many cases wild finish. I’ll have more on that soon.
------------
Help us maintain Icecap if you are able. Even small amounts help us pay the maintenance charges for the server that keep coming each month. We keep the site going without a support staff to try and provide you with information you can use. We have over 8000 entries searchable. Alternatively, consider a subscription to Weatherbell.