Catastrophism and Greenmail

The Greatest Irony of our Generation

When C0₂ is released into the atmosphere, wonderful things happen.  These things are so basic and obvious that a ten year old middle schooler can grasp them (if they attend a reactionary institute that still teaches science).  But adults long ago gave up on science and replaced it with ideological catastrophism.  There is a certain attraction to believing the world is on the verge of destruction.  It relieves the general ennui.  It makes one feel alive.  Much like the endorphin laden thrill after bungy-jumping. 

Carbon dioxide, we are told, is going to destroy the planet by heating the atmosphere and baking us all to death.  Except for a couple of realities.  The first is that C0₂ is a “heavy” gas and one would expect that it would naturally slurp around the surface of the earth, rather than head off into the upper atmosphere.  This is good news because of another reality: large amounts of carbon dioxide are absorbed by the oceans and green growing things.  It is the latter which interests us.

The reality is that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide greens the earth.  It is the greenest gas there is.  Ideological Greenists stupidly oppose the cutting down of the world’s forests and the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What the left hand gives, the right hand would snatch away.  It turns out that the world’s forests are growing much faster thanks to all the wonderful food they are getting from increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Greening of the Earth

90 Percent of CO2 Emissions Go Towards Fuelling Rapid Forest Growth Rate

by Donna Rachel Edmunds  

12 Nov 2014

BreitbartLondon

 

A new examination of the distribution of CO₂ has found that some areas of the earth experience huge seasonal variation by as much as 16 parts per million (ppm), whilst in other areas, notably at the Antarctic and equator, levels remain relatively stable. The analysis suggests that vast majority of CO₂ emissions are captured in boreal forests, which have consequently been enjoying a ‘greening’ over the past few decades.

Writing on the blog of Joanne Nova, the Australian science writer who uncovered the vast amount of money driving the climate change industry in 2009, fellow scientist Tom Quirk explains his findings. Quirk explains that a recent isotopic analysis of atmospheric CO₂ shows that only around 10 percent of man-made emissions find their way into the atmosphere. He asks, where, then, is the remainder going?

In order to solve this question he turned to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography’s data on atmospheric CO₂. The Institute provides both raw and ‘smoothed’ versions of the data – but only the raw data exposes the seasonal variations experienced by certain regions. At Barrow Point in Alaska, for example, the levels swung by as much as 16ppm each year, well beyond the 2ppm that humans are contributing to the atmosphere. Moreover, the swings are amplifying as the years progress, causing Quirk to deduce that they are down to the seasonal variations in plant growth (as the plants grow in spring and summer they suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere; in the winter the CO₂ is left in place, causing the swings observed).

The amplification is down to the fact that, across the northern hemisphere, plants are becoming more abundant (the more plants there are, the more CO₂ they can capture). Quirk cites three studies showing increases in vegetation over the last few decades. In Sweden, biomass was recorded as increasing by as much as 19 percent between 1997 and 2010 in birch forests, whilst in Russia, forest biomass increased by 11 percent. A third European report attributed 61 percent of forest growth to an increase in CO₂ availability, and only 26 percent to changes in climate.

“These three reports give an annual forest growth of between 0.5 percent and 1.6 percent while the annual growth rates for the seasonal variations [of atmospheric CO₂] are between 0.5 percent and 0.9 percent,” Quirk writes. 

With such entirely expected positive outcomes for the world’s forests because of more CO₂ being released into the atmosphere, we would expect the climate change doomsters to rejoice.  But no.  Pseudo-apocalypticism will never let the facts get in the way of a scary story.

Even NASA’s own satellite data shows that the planet is steadily greening, by as much as 1.5 percent a year in northern latitudes. Yet in May last year, the world’s media mournfully reported that atmospheric CO₂ had just passed the 400ppm mark for the first time in three to five million years, with NASA clamouring to paint the news in a calamitous light.

NASA scientist Dr Michael Gunson said “Passing the 400 mark reminds me that we are on an inexorable march to 450 ppm and much higher levels. These were the targets for ‘stabilization’ suggested not too long ago. The world is quickening the rate of accumulation of CO₂, and has shown no signs of slowing this down. It should be a psychological tripwire for everyone.”

To be fair, maybe the NASA ideologues are on to something.  Maybe the increase in  CO₂  does represent a clear and present danger, but “not as we know it, Jim”.  Maybe the forests and the plants are going to take over and squeeze humanity off the earth.  The Day of the Triffids draws nigh and H. G. Wells becomes a true prophet.

His colleague Laura Faye Tenenbaum, an Oceanography professor was more emphatic: “As a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students – who still believe in their young minds that success mostly depends on good grades and hard work, who believe in fairness, evenhandedness and opportunity – how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act.”

Dr William Patzert, a Research Oceanographer, was more political in his outlook: “Scary scorecard: catastrophic climate change 400, humanity zero. Listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game,” he said. 

Whoa.  We find the passion compelling as we do the All Blacks’ performance of  the haka.  But the facts, ma’am.  We need reliable data and reasonable inferences in this matter–not apocalyptic scare-mongering.

But Nova and Quirk are firm that there is no reason to draw alarming conclusions over rises in atmospheric CO₂, as nature is more than capable of not only dealing with the rise, but of capitalising on the extra CO₂.

Commenting on Quirk’s findings, Nova says “the northern Boreal forests are probably drawing down something like 2 – 5 gigatons of CO₂ every year, and because the seasonal amplitude is getting larger each year, it suggests there is no sign of saturation. Those plants are not bored of extra CO₂ yet. This fits with Craig Idso’s work on plant growth which demonstrates that the saturation point — where plants grow as fast as possible (and extra CO₂ doesn’t help) is somewhere above 1000 and below 2000ppm. We have a long way to go.”

And that, dear friends, is that.  More atmospheric CO₂ please. Quickly. Wonderful, beautiful green growing things depend upon us releasing more of the greenest of all gases into the atmosphere.  Breathe faster. 

The End is Nigh

Fashionable Nutters

The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has tossed up more than its fair share of nutters.  If you stupidly, but genuinely, believe that “the end is nigh” for the human race, let alone the planet, then such desperate times call for desperate measures.  We can understand the logic, just as we grasp the logic of those who have believed that the world will end at midnight on the 13th of June, 2001 (or whenever) and who have traipsed out into the desert to set up survivalist compounds, thereby avoiding the worst of Armageddon.

In each case, the logic is sound; it’s the premises that are false.  The Climate Change Doomsday Cult has  this one distinction from apocalyptic forbears, however.  It has managed to capture the fears and febrile imagination of the chattering classes and the Commentariat, normally too urbane and sophisticated to get taken in by Doomsday cults.  Here are a couple of examples of the elites having been suckered.  First, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, as reported in BreitbartNews: 

NEW YORK CITY — New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday during the People’s Climate March that the city’s private sector buildings may be mandated to be retrofitted to adapt to the city’s green house gas emission reduction plan. “We are now the largest city on the earth to adopt the 80/50 standard. We are going to retrofit all of our public buildings. We are going to work with the public sector. We are going to work with the private sector to retrofit their buildings. I’ve said very clearly, I think the private sector is ready and willing. I think it’s in all of our interests,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival. We’ll work with them. We’ll incentivize. We’ll support. If that is not moving fast enough, we will move to mandates because we have to get there. This is a matter of survival.” 

Mayor de Blasio announced he was committed to an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, beginning with sweeping regulations among buildings in the city.

The cost impost upon New York City will be horrendous.  Unintended perverse effects will follow: businesses migrating out of the city, owners of buildings going bankrupt; buildings being abandoned, economic growth (also known as employment, wages, and the ability to provide for families) will lag.  The only growth industry will be the power, organs, officials, and rules and regulations of the city government.  De Blasio is going to command and control New York into becoming a giant survivalist compound.  Paradoxically this will bring upon the city the equivalent of a nuclear winter, albeit by other means.  His plan will cause the alleged disasters hectored abroad by the Climate Change Doomsday Cult to come into being. But it’s all OK, because New Yorkers’ very survival is at stake. 

And here are some examples of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult in action the UK:

Actress Emma Thompson, arguably best known for her Best Actress Oscar in Howards End and for her courage in naming her daughter Gaia, has declared that anyone who doesn’t believe in climate change is “bonkers”.  . . .

“Unless we’re carbon free by 2030 the world is buggered,” Ms Thompson claimed, apparently unaware that the trace gas carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of almost every industrial process and that if anyone took her prescription seriously then Western Civilisation would be brought grinding to a halt and the world would indeed be “buggered.”

Yup.  Doomsday is looming.  Here is another version of the Climate Change Doomsday Cult, this time from a fashion designer.

Emma Thompson and Gaia weren’t the only celebrities lending their expertise to the climate march. Also present was fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who averred:

“A triad of [fossil fuel] monopolies, banks and politicians are ruining the planet. If runaway climate change kicks in then within a generation, there will be very little habitable on the planet and the suffering will be unimaginable.”

Could these icons of the Commentariat be wrong?   Yes.  Their passion may be compelling–but that’s always been true of Doomsday Cults.  Here is the “other side” of the argument, as summarised in the New York Post, soon to become the ex-New York Post (we confidently predict, if the madcap mayor has his way): 

Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”
Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” . . .The costs of feeding the climate-change “monster” are staggering. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 2001 to 2014 the US government spent $131 billion on projects meant to combat human-caused climate change, plus $176 billion for breaks for anti-CO2 energy initiatives.

Federal anti-climate-change spending is now running at $11 billion a year, plus tax breaks of $20 billion a year. That adds up to more than double the $14.4 billion worth of wheat produced in the United States in 2013.  Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”  Al Gore was right in one respect: Climate change is a moral issue — but that’s because there is nothing quite so immoral as well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global-warming policies, using money that could instead go to improve living standards in developing countries.

That is where the moral outrage should lie.

Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition. Bob Carter is former professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia.