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Directly from the article you posted above Michael……
“While rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the air can be beneficial for plants, it is also the chief culprit of climate change. The gas, which traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere, has been increasing since the industrial age due to the burning of oil, gas, coal and wood for energy and is continuing to reach concentrations not seen in at least 500,000 years. The impacts of climate change include global warming, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and sea ice as well as more severe weather events.”
If the increasing CO2 levels can have a global effect on greening then it can also have a global effect on warming with all the attendent consequences that may bring.
“The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited………“Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.”
The warming effect won’t diminish over time.
“While the detection of greening is based on data, the attribution to various drivers is based on models,” the same kinds of models derided by the climate change denialists.
Tom: Thanks for writing the above, but I don’t think this is a particularly solid refutation of the established science behind climate change. These are a series of assertions, without evidence, and unfounded opinions of the “Well, I don’t reckon…” variety that we saw a lot of earlier on in this thread.
Let’s go through a couple of your points.
1. “global climate seems to have been getting gradually warmer for about 24,000 years…”
Have you got something to back this up? This, easily found and well referenced,
appears to show a huge uptick in the last few decades, after a fairly stable 8000 years or so. It seems a heck of a coincidence for this recent uptick to just happen right as we start to dump tens of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.
Did you have something that proves otherwise? Or will your denial of the evidence alone simply have to do for us?
2. There is no convincing evidence that increased atmospheric CO2 causes temperatures to rise.
Actually there is – a lot of it. It’s basic science that you can prove for yourself if you want to. It is an effect that has been measured to a painstakingly exact degree, and to simply dismiss that suggests a positive avoidance of evidence, rather than just failing to find it.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/
Is the above just made up, in your opinion?
3. Atmospheric CO2 (and, indeed, temperatures) are currently quite close to the lowest they have ever been while there was life on Earth.
Goodness me, where are you getting this from? It is so easy to refute with a simple search, why do you put out unreferenced assertions all the time?
Since that was the best you had to offer, I’ll leave it there for now. But you did say the following:
“In extenuation of this decision, let me just adduce three quotations from people whose knowledge and common sense I respect.”
… which has precisely nothing to do with head-in-the-sand denialism. A rather disingenuous person – not yourself, of course, but someone intellectually dishonest – could quote a bunch of worthies making such statements, and then pretend its actually bolstering their case for absolutely anything.
Chomsky, for instance, is completely clear on the truth of man made climate change, so it’s rather curious you should be quoting him as if it supports a hand-waving dismissal of same.
I thought you had this subject so solidly nailed that you were going to make me realise that it’s obviously all a hoax, Tom. But – sadly enough – all you have made me realise, is that denialists have absolutely nothing except dismissal and baseless assertions.
ET, the greening, so far, is equivalent to almost twice the size of the U.S.A. About 70% of this greening has been attributed to the increase in CO2.
If you take the timescale of half a billion year, essentially the time scale of complex life, we are at very low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. C4 photosynthesis, may not have come about, if Carbon dioxide had stayed at greater levels?
That is not to say that the Earth has not warmed by 1.4 degrees over the last few hundred years but is was quite a bit colder during the Little Ice Age. Miserable conditions set the scene for a food/health crisis in the 1300’s, so when the Black Death hit the Eurasian people were already considerably disadvantaged, so that maybe only half survived.
Had it been warmer, more would probably survived.The first rule of Dunning-Kruger club is:
You do not know you’re in Dunning-Kruger club.Let’s take a look at dailysceptic.org. The page Tom Welsh linked to claims that temperatures are not really increasing; any apparent increase is due to inaccuracy in measurements. However, on the side bar, and by the very same author (Chris Morrison), is another article, “Almost All Recent Global Warming Caused by Green Air Policies – Shock Revelation From NASA”, which apparently accepts that temperature increases are real:
– “The world of climate science is in shock following extraordinary findings from a team of high-powered NASA scientists that suggest most of the recent global temperature increases are due to the introduction of draconian fuel shipping regulations designed to help prevent global warming.”
Tom Welsh, what I demonstrated there is called scepticism – instead of simply believing something because some website told me to, I examined it for internal consistency, and within seconds found a serious lack of it. The excerpt also contains dishonesty, incompetence, or gross incomprehension of source material; Morrison is referring to shipping fuel regulations, not fuel shipping regulations, and those regulations are to prevent acid rain not global heating – in climate science, it is well understood that sulphurous fuels reduce global heating, so reducing them will increase global temperatures, which is exactly what has happened.
Tom Welsh, I didn’t even have to look hard; Daily Sceptic is a website for the gullible. Your failure to notice such obvious bloopers clearly shows that you are entirely ignorant about climate science – so ignorant that you’re incapable of recognising your own ignorance.
Michael norton, if you’re going to look at carbon dioxide over the last half billion years, I think you’d best look at the oxygen ratio too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png
I hope you know that the fossil fuel companies have poured vast amounts of money into convincing people that carbon dioxide emissions aren’t a problem. One of their tricks is to make utterly inappropriate comparisons between now and many millions of years ago – neglecting to mention the three metre millipedes, and insects the size of dustbin lids. Anything more than 2.6 million years ago is irrelevant to the present climate regime.
Yes, life has survived vast changes in climate, but that doesn’t mean human society could; even individual humans couldn’t survive the changes in oxygen ratio linked above. Also remember that there have been five mass extinctions, before the one humans are causing now, and had better stop, quick.
dailysceptic.org really is the pits. I checked out their covid article. They make a big fuss about a study having been posted in the BMJ. They don’t mention that (1) it’s by oncologists, not epidemiologists, (2) its basic data came from the Our World in Data website, FFS, (3) it’s in the publichealthbmj open access section of the BMJ website, not the peer reviewed BMJ journal, and (4), from the Supplemental Materials section of the footnotes under the article itself:
– This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content.
That’s three articles I looked at, and all three are trash.
“archaea-generated methane as an alternate power source”
When people talk about fossil fuels, we are expected to imagine long-dead, long-buried Carbon, like coal from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Carl Woese, shook things up in the seventies when he announced they had discovered Archaea.
It turned out that Archaea may have been the earliest form of life, and it also may have been from Archaea that Eukarote life evolved. Some Archaea have lots of genes. Some Archaea expel Methane as a waste.
This is still happening today in a massive way.
Shimizu Kensetsu Kabushiki Gaisha developed a device to treat waste water from paper plants and food plants, the water was then fed into a reactor, and eventually they got Methane, which could be used to power the whole thing.
Methanogenisis: that means certain groups of Archaea giving off Methane – meaning at least some Methane is not fossil.
Meaning we could help Archaea to make Methane by feeding them waste products; in return we get clean Methane.“Will o’ the Wisp”
very near my home is a bog, it stretches for a long way, East West, it was probably formed by the retreating glaciers.
Anyway, if you walk along the edge of the stream and shove a stick into the sediment, most times a large bubble of gas escapes, this gas is Methane. This leads me to think that Methane producing Archaea are constantly at work, they never sleep. In the sediment of the seas you get cold seeps, this is Methane rising, this Methane is constantly being produced in the rocks and in the sediment under the seas. I think some scientists are coming round to the notion that about half of the weight of all life in the oceans is Archaea.Didn’t we have a long discussion before about methane in other threads, the fact that it is itself a potent green house gas accounting for 30-40% of global warming? Burning it produces CO2. Didn’t we also discuss the fact that it’s a small molecule, leaks like hell across all of the process of extraction, distribution and storage?
North Sea Gas is almost all Methane.
We have been using North Sea gas since The Dash for Gas, the eighties, I don’t thing much gas leaks out of pipes, does it?ET, it was discussed on the main site under some of Craig’s posts I think, and on the forums. Yes methane is a potent greenhouse gas, the third most significant after water vapour and CO2. Yes it burns to create CO2 (and water vapour). But it’s hydrogen that’s as leaky as hell and embrittles metals; methane is the major component of natural gas; it isn’t too leaky and it’s quite easy to handle.
Michael, the big leakages of natural gas are when it’s shipped as LNG, when its global heating is nearly as bad as coal.
Mainland Europe is big, so its coastline to population ratio is much smaller than the UK’s, so the UK acts as a LNG terminal for Europe, delivering gas to the European mainland via pipelines.
Clark et al.
How would you judge the alleged environmental dangers/pollution that would have been caused by an operational Nord Stream 2 as to leakages?
2021 German environmental groups had started to file a court case against the Swiss company operating NS2 with the goal to shut it down. (A problem which obviously was solved less peacefully.)
In hindsight I would not be surprised if this legal maneuver was in truth a covert campaign by the GREEN Party in conjunction with the US. As to end the pipeline under the guise of honest worries over our environment.
But scientifically, was that sound or not? In comparison to other sources of pollution/energy and in regards of an overall benefit/cost sheet.
It would be better for Europe if they had their Natural Gas piped in from Holland, from U.K. from Norway, or from Russia, far more efficient that transporting American Natural Gas across the Atlantic
but that is politics.
On this one politics goes against global warming policy.Indeed Clark, in The Decline of Fossil Fuels and Limits of Renewable Energy thread. Where did Natasha go? Natasha contributed a lot of information but I think got tired of us. I hope she is well. And Lapsed Agnostic.
I had however been reading about a lot of leakage of methane and the industry’s former reliance on outdated methods for calculating leakage. Now satellite surveillance and more up-to-date methodology has discovered a lot of leakage in the oil and gas industry (of methane). There is burn off at oil and gas fields, leakage during extraction, cracked storage tanks left unfixed and the piping in most (maybe just in Europe) cities that supplies gas is old, leaky and difficult to repair because digging up streets and under housing to replace the piping is very expensive and disruptive. The infrastructure issues are apparrently amenable to being fixed with regulation and industry effort but at significant economic cost.
AG, there are various things to be balanced. Obviously, with such a high population density as exists now, without sufficient energy, a large proportion of people would die, society as it stands would collapse. Handled properly, in pipelines, natural gas produces around half as much greenhouse effect as coal for the same amount of energy. But modern gas power stations can also be started up and shut down quickly without a huge drop in efficiency, so gas is good at filling in for the intermittency of solar and wind generation. Coal power stations take around a week to reach full efficiency, and waste a huge amount of heat when they’re shut down. Pressurised water nuclear power stations also need to be kept running steadily, to keep them from falling into the so-called “iodine pit” which cuts their power output to about one tenth and takes about half a day to climb out of.
Gas was therefore chosen as the transition fossil fuel, to tide us over until enough wind, solar, grid upgrades and storage could be deployed. It would have been a reasonable plan if it had been developed sooner and faster, and combined with broad energy usage reduction policies.
I expect the aim of the Green’s legal case was to apply long term pressure to speed up the transition, to force the Swiss company to tackle leaks, and to pressure governments to reduce energy usage. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if US and Gulf gas interests helped the Greens; such convergence of interests is common.
Clark
Thank you!If there is now 20% plus extra leaf coverage (NASA) over the last forty years, we must assume, quite a lot more Carbon dioxide is stored in the top soil and in the new biomass?
To assume no extra Carbon had been (temporally) sequestered would be strange.Michael, more carbon dioxide is being sequestered but emissions outpace it, as shown by rising atmospheric concentration, below. This year’s increase was larger than any previous annual increase. Nearly every year, the increase breaks the previous record; it’s a hockey stick curve, one of many.
– “…there is now 20% plus extra leaf coverage (NASA) over the last forty years”
What is the carbon dioxide concentration increase over forty years? The predicament isn’t hard to reckon; burning fossil fuels releases gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year. For the atmosphere to remain in balance, comparable gigatonnes of extra vegetation would need to grow each year. Of course, that can’t happen because the fossil fuel deposits took million of years to accumulate, but are being burned in merely a couple of centuries.
China is stockpiling Copper.
Michaux and Bryce on China’s 2050 Master Plan, Green Energy Breakdown – YouTube, 1h 24m 52s
There almost certainly is not enough economically recoverable Copper for the energy transition, as it has been envisioned by our politicians, who are mostly brain-dead. It cannot work.
The most brain-dead choice we can make is to go all out for EV.
What Copper we can control is much more needed for electricity production.
It takes about fifteen years for a new mine to start up in the West. Money usually has to be borrowed, the pay back to banks/hedge funds is crippling any future mining.
Our future is destroyed by our system, in the West.2030 Green Hydrogen
the target has been set at 70 million tons of Green Hydrogen production by 2030but so far only 3 million tons a year is in the planning stage
Green Hydrogen currently being produced is only in the experimental stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk7odYJpcpgFlamanville Three finally given the go ahead to start loading fuel.
Initially expected to cost 3.3 billion Euros, now thought to have cost 19 billion Euros.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyX_H9e5pZg
This design is what Hinkley Point C is based on.There is about three times as much Carbon “stored” in soils as in the Atmosphere.
Cutting Rainforests down, in part to graze cattle, greatly reduces the active fertility of the soil and the soils ability to hold Carbon, quite often after the forest has been clearfelled and probably burnt, there is very little renewal of the top soil as most top soil is produced by trees. If land use could be thought about more scientifically, there could be ways to sequester much more Carbon, in the soils. This might aid sucking some Carbon from the Atmosphere.
However it would also be a ration notion, not to clearfell Rainforests.“Archaea have existed for over 3.5 billion years, yet they were detected in the plant endosphere only in the recent past and still, not much is known about them. Archaeal endophytes may be important microorganisms for sustainable agriculture, particularly in the face of climate change and increasing food demand due to population growth. Recent advances in culture-independent methods of research have revealed a diverse abundance of archaea from the phyla Euryarchaeota, Crenarchaeaota, and Thaumarchaeota globally that are associated with significant crops such as maize, rice, coffee, and olive. Novel insights into the plant microbiome have revealed specific genes in archaea that may be involved in numerous plant metabolic functions including amino acid production and phytohormone modulation. This is the first review article to address what is known about archaea as endophytes, including their patterns of colonization and abundance in various parts of different crop plants grown under diverse environmental conditions. This review aims to facilitate mainstream discussions and encourage future research regarding the occurrence and role of endophytic archaea in plants, particularly in relation to agricultural applications.”
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10754323/#:~:text=Instead%2C%20these%20endophytes%20can%20positively,pesticides%2C%20thus%20promoting%20sustainable%20agriculture.Some now think, that over half of the mass of life in the Oceans is Archaea.
Archaea obviously have multiple roles in Carbon cycles.
Some types make Carbon dioxide, others consume CO2.
Some make Methane. As Methane rises in the Oceans, almost all is consumed by life, probably, mostly bacteria but also other types of Archaea.This is incredibly interesting, about coral, ice ages and the Great barrier Reef.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGWpCG1g8J4&list=PLWNxhy3V6nqMyBz6neVMdWDZSoyLkHaDU
“To understand why the Great Barrier Reef is in far better state that the media, and many institutions, would have you believe, let us look at the incredible history and geography of the reef. Not so long ago, the Great Barrier Reef was just 3000 flat topped hills covered in grass and trees. Aboriginal people saw the birth of the recent incarnation of the reef, and once walked and lived where now coral and fish thrive. A coral reef is a huge pile of dead coral (mostly) – corals live on the bodies of their dead ancestors.”
Peter Ridd works unpaid as an Adjunct Fellow in the Project for Real Science run by the Institute of Public Affairs.
https://ipa.org.au/
