Nancy Pelosi’s niece is paid almost $200,000 per year to be the climate advisor for Kamala Harris’ Department of Housing and Urban Development. (26) ~~datahazard~~ on X: “Nancy Pelosi’s niece should not be paid $181,648.00 by the US Taxpayer to … Continue reading →
via Real Climate Science
November 20, 2024 at 08:40PM
By Vijay Jayaraj
A farmer in South Korea’s Gyeongbok Province carefully tends to his potato field, while halfway across the world the engines of a thousand cars idle on an American interstate highway. These seemingly disconnected scenes share a bond through the fertilization effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which has been greening the Earth for decades.
Yes, the CO2 effluent of tailpipes and industrial flues are good for plants and all of life, contrary to the alarming tales that make this invisible gas an environmental bogeyman. Increasing CO2 concentrations are literally making the world greener, and in many cases, it’s sending crop production to record levels.
A 2020 study, funded by Cooperative Research Program for Agriculture Science & Technology Development, reported that potatoes grown in an atmosphere of elevated CO2—similar to what might be expected in coming decades—didn’t just survive but thrived!
The plants yielded a “distinct increase in growth and development and canopy net photosynthetic rate during tuber initiation and bulking. Consequently, biomass and canopy net photosynthesis increased, and tuber yield increased by 20.3%,” the researchers wrote.
This isn’t just good news for potato farmers. The CO2 fertilization effect plays a role in the photosynthesis of all plants, and an increase in the gas acts as a kind of turbo boost. Significant increases in yields are seen in wheat, rice, soybeans and maize—all staple crops that feed billions.
As CO2 concentrations rise, the water requirement for many plants decreases, making them more tolerant of drought – a scourge of farmers for millennia.
In the U.S. too, agriculture has flourished because of the additional CO2 in the atmosphere, including in the agricultural heartland of the Midwest. As the data analysis in the CO2 Coalition’s report on the Midwest shows, it is very clear that a warming climate and the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide composition are increasing crop yields in the Midwest’s corn and soybean regions.
As Americans contribute roughly 14 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person annually, those emissions are fertilizing crops across the globe.
The greening effect extends far beyond agriculture. Satellite data from NASA has attributed the increased greenness over the past 35 years to the combined impact of elevated CO2 levels and optimal temperatures for plant growth.
The rising emissions of China and India from their increased use of fossil fuels have contributed significantly to this global greening and has benefited ambitious tree-planting programs and intensive agriculture. Certain countries in Europe have registered an increase in forest area as well. In fact, “36 countries are gaining more trees than they’re losing,” reports the World Resources Institute.
In fact, the rate of greening due to CO2 will be much higher than the rate of browning from the expansion of arid landscapes. Researchers at a Chinese university say that “by the end of this century, drylands will expand slightly by approximately 5%, while vegetation productivity will increase by about 50%.” Elevated CO2 impedes the expansion of drylands and “greatly promotes vegetation growth with increases in both leaf assimilation and canopy foliage,” they say.
Dr. Indur Goklany reports that 70% of Earth’s recent greening is attributed to emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and that “fossil fuel dependent technologies have increased agricultural yields directly or indirectly by at least 167%.”
Whether it’s the tomato plants of Europe or the tropical forests in India, it’s clear that CO2-enriched air is greening the planet, and we as a society have been positive contributors to that. You might say that CO2 is the green energy for plant life.
This commentary was first published at California Globe on November 18, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
via Watts Up With That?
November 20, 2024 at 08:04PM
Increased storminess is caused by both global warming and global cooling
Just having fun
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via Real Climate Science
November 20, 2024 at 07:26PM
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. reports at WSJ on observing the Irresistible March of Energy Realism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The publishing gods have smiled on French energy historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. His book, whose U.S. edition is coming out in August, is already getting wide notice. Its French title essentially means “there is no transition.” Mr. Fressoz tells a podcaster he’s even happier with the English title, “More and More and More.”
Energy sources are additive and symbiotic, he writes. Coal, oil, gas,
wood, nuclear and renewables all grew together, they didn’t replace each other.
An increase in coal provided steel piping to enable oil and gas production. More wood than ever was consumed to support British coal mines. The world’s biggest maker of wooden barrels at one time was John D. Rockefeller. A car in the 1930s consumed more coal via its required steel than it would consume in fossil fuels in its lifetime.
In the U.K. today, a single wood-burning electric plant consumes more wood than Britain’s entire 18th-century economy and yet accounts for a small fraction of Britain’s current energy output. The only transition has been to more energy consumption.
As this column has pointed out, subsidies for green energy, adopted globally by the Obama imitators in lieu of carbon taxes, only end up subsidizing more energy use, including copious fossil energy to make batteries, wind turbines and solar panels.
In a blue moon, honest greens will admit as much and argue that when green energy has been sufficiently built up with government aid, the U.S. will lead the nations to introduce carbon taxes.
The faulty assumption here is that phasing out fossil energy will be any easier in 50 years when the world is consuming twice as much energy and half is still fossil energy, producing the same emissions as today. A likelier outcome: When the green subsidies stop, as inevitably they must, the result will be a burst of emissions as the formerly subsidized users shift to fossil energy to stay solvent.
The Trump election poses a special puzzle for domestic U.S. automakers: How much of their $110 billion investment in electric vehicles to write off? In the absence of subsidies and mandates, what’s the natural market for EVs and, importantly, what kind?
The Rube Goldberg effect of U.S. policy has led to heavily subsidized status pieces for high-end consumers, whose large batteries are mainly used to haul around their large batteries.
These are net losers for the stated goal of reducing CO2 emissions. Unknowables loom. An Oxfam report finds up to $41 billion in World Bank climate spending, backed by U.S. taxpayers, unaccounted for. This is only the beginning. What happens when voters realize not billions but trillions doled out to the green-energy lobby have had no effect on atmospheric CO2 levels or climate?
Meanwhile, hard to find are detailed climate or emissions projections that don’t effectively assume successful efforts to stabilize warming at the putative 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius levels.
These efforts at stabilization aren’t happening. In the peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.
Mr. Fressoz, in the “Decouple” podcast, delves into the fascinating 1970s. Governments everywhere, along with the oil industry, well recognized the CO2 problem. The British government of Margaret Thatcher realized its emissions were becoming too small a share of the total for reductions to make a difference. A U.S. panel calculated that even a heroic U.S. effort would delay warming only by a few years.
A Chinese representative warned a 1979 conference that by 2000, his country intended to burn more coal than the world’s then-annual total.
Our path—unavoidable adaptation—was laid down long before today’s believer-denier debate, a language effectively developed and deployed to promote climate pork, not meaningful climate action. Last year, by one accounting, global emissions topped 40 billion tons for the first time. I suspect carbon taxes may yet be adopted, albeit for fiscal reasons. Solar geoengineering, using particulates to adjust the amount of sunlight landing on Earth, is probably in the cards at some point.
In Chris Wright, the Liberty Energy CEO, Donald Trump has nominated to head the U.S. Energy Department a determined evangelist for energy realism. This is why I introduced him to readers earlier this year.
Mr. Wright, founder of a fracking services company, believer in climate change, enthusiast for nuclear energy, is the antidote to what Mr. Fressoz calls the “troubling” politics of climate change, which has consisted entirely of false promises.
Mr. Trump isn’t the climate outlier you think. Any U.S. presidential race in the past 40 years was a contest of two versions of doing nothing about climate change. The only difference: Certain versions of doing nothing were a lot more expensive for taxpayers than others.
via Science Matters
November 20, 2024 at 05:37PM
