I’ve done 3 videos now on the pervasive “CO2 is good for crops” canard.
Finally, the mainstream media might be catching up with what climate activists have been talking about for years. On sunday, the New York Times published a long essay about the dawning realization on the part of scientists, agronomists, and public officials, that climate is already having a major impact on food systems and food prices worldwide.
I can’t improve on Joe Romm’s great discussion piece over at ClimateProgress, but here are a few snips from the Times article, “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself”.
Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.
Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.
Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.
The article points out that the long touted notion that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase plant productivity have not panned out, largely because these notions were based on laboratory or greenhouse conditions, not reflective of the real world, where extreme weather events of recent years have taken a severe toll.
Now as results from “real world” crop tests have been coming in, ag scientists have been taken aback.
They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.
But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. “When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute — this is not what we expected,” said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.
The results have been similar for other staple crops.
For First world nations, the idea of food shortages is an abstraction, and if they think about it at all, it is in terms of giving some money for relief organizations to throw an extra sack of surplus grain at struggling third world people. What has changed in the last generation is that the stability of those third world nations is now a much higher stakes proposition. Across the middle east, governments are falling due to social unrest due, at least in part, to rising food prices.
Pakistan, shaken to the core by last year’s catastrophic flooding, is nuclear armed.
Comfortable westerners can no longer afford to ignore what climate change, largely due to our emissions, is doing to the rest of humanity. We are all together on this ride.
There are a few studies showing that the expected increased green growth from CO2 is stymied by the harm caused by tropospheric ozone.
So one minor boost from one emission is completely sabotaged by another.
Ooops !
Great show, Don’t it make my Green World Brown.
=> also Good for Plant Growth Myth
Here’s Monckton’s argument, applied to water:
‘Water is absolutely required for life, you’d die of thirst from its lack within 2 weeks, and your body is 75% water. Hence, this aqua-engineer-communist hoax that you need air-tanks to go scuba diving is pure bunk! Just breathe in the water of which you are already composed, and you’ll find that everything will go just fine!’
The biochemical opening on a plant’s leaf is called the stoma (plural: stomata). This is the point where CO2 enters -AND- where water is lost. In order to limit water loss, 80% of the plant species growing new leaves will produce a lower number of stoma.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Stomata?topic=58074
Most of the plants which do better in a high CO2 environment only produce higher stalks (weeds and bamboo to only name two) but this does not increase the nutritional value to animals since we [mostly] only eat the leaves.
I “think” this second bit came from here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
The headline is contradicted by the article.
The headline says, “CO2 is not pumping up plants.”
But the article says, “they hoped the [additional CO2] might bump [soybean] yields as much as 30 percent… But… the bump was only half as large.”
Half of 30% is still 15%, a quite significant “bump.” In other words, the study confirmed what greenhouse operators already know: more CO2 is good for crops. The only quibble is over just how MUCH good it does.
Moreover, the myth of “extreme weather events” produced by global warming has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. E.g., here in N.C., where we tend to get a lot of hurricanes, it has been a surprisingly long time since we’ve had one. as Steven Goddard recently noted, “It has now been 1000 days since any hurricane hit the U.S., the longest spell since before the Civil War.”
Dave
and everyone that watches Fox news knows, that if it ain’t happ’nin’ to ‘mericuns, it ain’t happ’nin’.
2010 was actually a very active hurricane season – we lucked out in that none came ashore in a critical area of the US, and we didn’t have one tear thru the BP oil spill.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/archive.html?year=2010&month=11
Goddard, is, of course, a joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wbzK4v7GsM
Bottom line on food is that one of the leading grain producing nations had to stop exports due to a unique-in-a-thousand years drought and heat wave, severe drought and flooding had similar effects in other critical areas, and the resulting spike in food prices has been a major causative factor in unrest throughout the middle east.
The idea that increased co2 will bring about “the greening of planet earth” is belied by the actual facts on the ground. A greenhouse or marijuana grow-room is not a farm field, sorry, and agricultural production has been hit by a steady stream of weather extremes consistent with our expectations of AGW caused climate change.
Atmospheric co2 keeps skyrocketing even tho we’ve been told plants would immediately be scarfing up all that extra carbon.Sadly, its not happening.
Additionally, in case anyone bothered to listen all the way to the end of that first video, the claim of a “40% decline in phytoplankton” in the world’s oceans has also been thoroughly debunked. There has been no decline in phytoplankton. See:
http://tinyurl.com/3em4mer
Dave
Steven Goddard & Anthony Watts are careful, diligent scientists. Keven Trenberth, et al could learn a lot from their example.
greenman3610, you uploaded this video 2.5 weeks AFTER Willis Eschenbach wrote a guest piece at WUWT, saying the Boyce / Nature mag claims were not believable. You should have paid attention to him. Nine months later (April 14, 2011), Nature finally published a set of three responses to the Boyce article, all showing that Boyce was wrong and Willis is right (though without crediting him).
If you spent more time reading Goddard and WUWT, and learning from them, instead of insulting them, you’d not have have included the embarrassing nonsense about phytoplankton decline in your video.
There is extreme weather somewhere, almost all the time. But there’s been no general increase in extreme weather events associated with increasing CO2 levels… and increased CO2 levels do, indeed, boost plant growth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2qVNK6zFgE
Dave
LOL! Steven Goddard a scientist? Show me his profile. Who is he?
To the dispute about declining plankton (Boyce Willis).
First of all, it is commonly acknowledged that phytoplankton concentrations are declining. => NASA article 2002, PHYTOPLANKTON IN NORTHERN OCEANS HAVE DECLINED FROM 1980s LEVELS
Secondly, Boyce et al have replied to the article of Ryan R. Rykaczewski & John P. Dunne in Nature => Boyce et al. reply and in the New York Times => Researchers Defend Study Finding Plankton Decline:
“As is typical with many new findings published in leading scientific journals, our work documenting global declines in marine phytoplankton has been subjected to further scrutiny by the scientific community. This is necessary and important, especially given the nature of our findings, and we appreciate the issues raised by three other research groups which have now been published as brief communications in the Journal Nature. In order to test the robustness of our results in light of these specific concerns we conducted extensive new analyses in Nature that are not mentioned in the blog post. In these analyses we accounted for a possible bias between different plankton measurements. We looked at the different data sources in isolation and in combination. We looked at phytoplankton trends the North Atlantic in more detail. These sensitivity analyses revealed that our results are robust and that a long-term decline in phytoplankton is unequivocal. .
We acknowledged at the time our paper was published that the historical dataset we used is under-sampled, as only satellites can provide a seamless global grid of observations. But we reject the view that this limits our knowledge of plankton trends to the satellite era (1979-86, 1997-present). Thousands of seagoing scientists have collected millions of plankton observations that can provide us with a deeper understanding of marine plankton trends. These measurements become sparser as we go further back in time, hence trend estimates become more uncertain; of course we fully accounted for this uncertainty in our analysis. We also acknowledged that since we excluded all phytoplankton data sampled in near-shore and in deep (>20 meters) waters, our findings should not be interpreted as a comprehensive phytoplankton budget. Since the extensive robustness analyses that we have performed did not alter our results, we remain confident in our original analysis and are now embarking on several follow-up projects. For example, we plan to work together with our critics in expanding our current phytoplankton database to include additional datasets, such as satellite data, in order to optimize the spatial and temporal coverage. This would enable a more robust examination of the drivers and consequences of phytoplankton change, and may yield valuable insight into potential future trends.
Science does not progress by merely criticizing new findings but rather by incorporating criticism into new analysis. We have done this, and our findings remain valid: phytoplankton has indeed declined globally over the past century.”
I’m no nothing about Steven Goddard but I do know that Anthony Watts only has a grade 12 diploma from secondary school. Like more than 50% of the “weather presenters” in the USA, he has no post secondary science education.
=> My comment on the pseudonym “Steven Goddard”. You wouldn’t find him because it’s an alias name. Ever heard that a real scientist does hide behind an alias name and runs a website under that name? I debunked a graph from him last year when I visited his website the first time. Some “scientist”. Ever read any peer reviewed study from “Steven Goddard”? Does the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies say something to you? That’s where he obviously did steal his name from.
People should really learn to check sources and the publishers before they believe any myths.