Study: Earth is becoming GREENER, not BROWNER due to climate change
Guest essay by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels It’s hard to say how many punny posts we came up with using those words when Carol Browner was Bill Clinton’s EPA Administrator, but here we use it in the context of a recent Science paper by J-F.
Source: Study: Earth is becoming GREENER, not BROWNER due to climate change…
PLANET EARTH COVERED IN MUCH MORE FOREST THAN THOUGHT
Date: 11/05/17
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A new global analysis of the distribution of forests and woodlands has “found” 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest – an area equivalent to 60% of the size of Australia. The discovery increases the known amount of global forest cover by around 9%, and will significantly boost estimates of how much carbon is stored in plants worldwide.
The new forests were found by surveying “drylands” – so called because they receive much less water in precipitation than they lose through evaporation and plant transpiration. As we and our colleagues report today in the journal Science, these drylands contain 45% more forest than has been found in previous surveys.
We found new dryland forest on all inhabited continents, but mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, around the Mediterranean, central India, coastal Australia, western South America, northeastern Brazil, northern Colombia and Venezuela, and northern parts of the boreal forests in Canada and Russia. In Africa, our study has doubled the amount of known dryland forest.
The world’s drylands: forested areas shown in green; non-forested areas in yellow. Bastin et al., Science (2017)
With current satellite imagery and mapping techniques, it might seem amazing that these forests have stayed hidden in plain sight for so long. But this type of forest was previously difficult to measure globally, because of the relatively low density of trees.
What’s more, previous surveys were based on older, low-resolution satellite images that did not include ground validation. In contrast, our study used higher-resolution satellite imagery available through Google Earth Engine – including images of more than 210,000 dryland sites – and used a simple visual interpretation of tree number and density. A sample of these sites were compared with field information to assess accuracy.
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MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’
Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT atmospheric science professor Richard Lindzen suggests that many claims regarding climate change are exaggerated and unnecessarily alarmist.
Introduction:
For over 30 years, I have been giving talks on the science of climate change. When, however, I speak to a non-expert audience, and attempt to explain such matters as climate sensitivity, the relation of global mean temperature anomaly to extreme weather, that warming has decreased profoundly for the past 18 years, etc., it is obvious that the audience’s eyes are glazing over. Although I have presented evidence as to why the issue is not a catastrophe and may likely be beneficial, the response is puzzlement. I am typically asked how this is possible. After all, 97% of scientists agree, several of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past 18 years, all sorts of extremes have become more common, polar bears are disappearing, as is arctic ice, etc. In brief, there is overwhelming evidence of warming, etc. I tended to be surprised that anyone could get away with such sophistry or even downright dishonesty, but it is, unfortunately, the case that this was not evident to many of my listeners. I will try in this brief article to explain why such claims are, in fact, evidence of the dishonesty of the alarmist position.
The 97% meme:
This claim is actually a come-down from the 1988 claim on the cover of Newsweek that all scientists agree. In either case, the claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97% will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people. The claim is made by a number of individuals and there are a number of ways in which the claim is presented. A thorough debunking has been given in the Wall Street Journal by Bast and Spencer. One of the dodges is to poll scientists as to whether they agree that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased, that the Earth has been warming (albeit only a little) and that man has played some part. This is, indeed, something almost all of us can agree on, but which has no …
New Climate Study Calls EPA’s Labeling Of CO2 A Pollutant ‘Totally False’
A new study published by seasoned researchers takes aim at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to issue regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
The study claims to have “proven that it is all but certain that EPA’s basic claim that CO2 is a pollutant is totally false,” according to a press statement put out by Drs. Jim Wallace, John Christy and Joe D’Aleo.
Wallace, Christy and D’Aleo — a statistician, a climatologist and meteorologist, respectively — released a study claiming to invalidate EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
“This research failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 14 temperature data sets that were analyzed,” the authors say in the release for the second edition of their peer-reviewed work.
“Moreover, these research results clearly demonstrate that once the solar, volcanic and oceanic activity, that is, natural factor, impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no ‘record setting’ warming to be concerned about,” the researchers say. “In fact, there is no natural factor adjusted warming at all.”
The study is intended to bolster a petition Wallace and D’Aleo filed with EPA as part of the Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC), asking the agency to reconsider its endangerment finding.
The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) also filed a petition with EPA to reconsider the endangerment finding. The Trump administration has not indicated whether or not they will reconsider the Obama-era finding. Any challenge would be met with legal action from environmental activists.…
Nation Mag: CO2 called the ‘other poison gas killing Syrians’ – Declares CO2 ‘a far more deadly gas’ than nerve agent Sarin gas
…Full The Nation article here:
he gas attack in Syria on April 4 consumed the world’s attention and galvanized the Trump White House, leading to the launch of 59 cruise missiles on a small airport from which the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been bombing the fundamentalist rebels in Idlib province. The pictures of suffering children, Trump said, had touched him. Yet the president and most of his party are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of tons of a far more deadly gas—carbon dioxide. Climate scientist James Hansen has described our current emissions as like setting off 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs each day, every day of the year.
The Syrian civil war has left more than 400,000 people dead, among them graveyards full of children and innocent noncombatants. About half the country’s 23 million people have been left homeless, and of those, 4 million have been driven abroad (some of them contributing to Europe’s refugee crisis and its consequent rightward political shift). The war occurred for many complex reasons, including social and political ones. The severest drought in recorded modern Syrian history in 2007–10, however, made its contribution.
The mega-drought drove 1.5 million farmers and farmworkers off the land to the seedy bidonvilles ringing cities such as Homs and Hama. In the northeast, 70 percent of the farm livestock died in those years. These displaced and dispossessed day laborers, who seldom found remunerative new work in Syria’s stagnant urban economy, joined in the demonstrations against the regime. Some were later drawn into the civil war as militiamen. Others in the end fled their country.
Of course, Syria has had milder periodic droughts all through history. Moreover, some countries in the region, such as Israel, have been much better at water management than the decrepit Baath state in Syria. It matters how such crises are handled. A team of scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, however, found no natural explanation for how rapidly Syria has been drying out over the past century or for the withering severity of the latest drought. Human-caused climate change, which has raised the temperature of the planet
Watch: Tony Heller of Real Climate Science: Is Carbon Dioxide A Pollutant?
…Busted: American Lung Association Never Mentions CO2 as Harmful to Human Health
Via: https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/american-lung-association-never-mentions-co2-as-harmful/
I just finished watching Chris Wallace grill EPA director Scott Pruitt and was shocked to see the questioning of Chris Wallace. It was if he got his talking points from MSNBC or Michael Mann. The one comment he repeated were highly speculative comments made about the clean power act saving thousands of lives. To support these claims he referenced the American Lung Association’s position multiple times. I found that extremely odd. If there is any organization that understands that CO2 is not a pollution, it is the American Lung Association. The entire purpose of the lung is to manage the delicate balance between CO2 and O2 in the human body. CO2 is necessary for the lung and blood to function. Too little or too much CO2 in the lung and the pH of the blood can change, hyper- ventilating can cause a person to lose consciousness, too much CO2 and a person can suffocate. The standard level of CO2 in the lungis between 2.7 to 7.5%. To put that in perspective atmospheric CO2 is 400 ppm, or 0.04%. 2.7 to 7.5% or 27,000 ppm to 75,000 ppm is between 67 and 187x the level of the atmosphere. Submarines can have CO2 levels near 10,000 ppm. The lungs have absolutely no problem handling high levels of CO2. Plants are the same. Higher CO2 levels make plants more drought resistant and greatly increases their yields. Plants die when CO2 drops below 180 ppm.
typical or physiological CO2 levels in the lungs which range from about 20 to 50 mm Hg or from about 2.7 to 7.5%.
It is for that reason, I questioned Chris Wallace’s approach and had to check out the American Lung Association. Sure enough, the American Lung Association makes the obligatory platitudes towards “climate change,” but never with an “N” mentions CO2 as a harmful pollutant. Sometimes a half-truth is often quite the lie. They did nothing to clarify the critical role CO2 plays in improving and saving the lives of every living organism. They do vaguely mention “carbon pollution” and state that utility plants produce CO2, but conveniently never mention CO2 as a health risk. Interestingly, they do mention that “biomass plants” are major sources of pollution. I’m pretty sure far more people die and suffer from natural causes of asthma and hayfever than CO2. I’ve never heard of anyone having an allergic …
Coral Reef Sophistry: Reality — ‘Not due to CO2’
Via: https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/coral-reef-sophistry/
Almost everytime I look into an alarmist’s claim, there is an easy to identify natural cause of the observation.
The arctic sea ice is greatly impacted by the wind direction, storms and warm water entering the arctic. None of which are due to CO2.
Polar bears are doing just great, so there is no issue there.
The Mt Kilimanjaro Glacier is disappearing due to sublimation, not warming.
The global temperatures are relatively stable if the urban heat island effect and temperature station location are controlled for. This is supported by “unadjusted” long term thermometer records.
Water vapor causes lower tropospheric temperatures, not CO2.
Now we have an explanation for Great Barrier Reef bleaching. El Ninos and El Ninas alter the sea level of the reefs, and the lower the sea level exposing the coral. Coral is shallow water tend to bleach. Not due to CO2, but due to exposure. Put almost anything out in direct sunlight and it will turn white. No CO2 needed.
If Skeptics used same tactics as warmists: ‘It’s Official, Global Warming & Higher CO2 Ended California Drought!’
If the climate realists used the same tactics as the climate alarmists today’s headlines across the globe would read “It’s Official, Global Warming and Higher CO2 Ended the California Drought!!!” The entire climate change house of cards is largely based upon pseudo-science, where an outlier observation is portrayed as the norm. For example, the bleaching of the coral reefs is due to exposure to the sun, not more CO2. The loss of Arctic sea Ice is largely due to natural changes in the ocean and wind currents. Recent claims of a warming Antarctica are based upon an extreme case of cherry picking. Global temperature records are greatly influenced by known non-CO2 related factors such as the Urban Heat Island Effect, that when adjusted for, eliminate most of if not all warming from the data set. Experiments to demonstrate CO2 caused warming are simply laughable, as are the IPCC models created to “prove” the highly flawed theory. The number of hurricanes has collapsed, but you won’t find that in the headlines.
None of that matters however because climate “science” isn’t about science, it is about politics. It is all about how the story is spun. In reality, the “Social Cost of Carbon” is negative. There are astronomical benefits to burning fossil fuels and higher CO2 levels. Life expectancy, quality of life and economic growth have all increased along with atmospheric CO2. As has the “greening of the Northern Hemisphere.” Higher crop yields and lower food and energy prices are all directly associated with petroleum production and higher CO2 levels. Societies thrive during warm periods, they collapse during cooling and Ice Ages. Now, with the ending of the devastating California drought, by sticking with the standards and methods consistent with the field of climate “science,” we can now claim that global warming and the burning of fossil fuels has ended the California drought. The CO2 evidence is overwhelming. Higher CO2 “caused” the end to the California drought. The numbers simply don’t lie
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Oh No! Study warns of CO2 at 5,000 parts per million by the year 2400! ‘To cause unprecedented warming’
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/04/05/study-offers-dire-warning-climate-change/cyozAC0fjeamFAWhiEXAFL/story.html