Posted on 09/21/2009 9:12:15 PM PDT by Maelstorm
There’s good news on the global climate change front: All that carbon dioxide blamed for global warming is actually good for our planet, says Cody scientist and writer Leighton Steward.
“The earth’s atmosphere needs more carbon dioxide,” he said at a recent Rotary Club meeting. “That ought to get everyone’s attention.”
The CO2 level now is about 385 parts per million. It’s been as high as 7,000 during the earth’s history. *
“Climate is always changing,” he said. “You should never expect climate at an equilibrium, and history shows it’s not.”
More CO2 means better crops and forests, Steward says, but not necessarily a warmer planet since other factors play a bigger role in heating the planet.
“This relates directly to the food supply,” he said. “Green is good, and CO2 is very green.”
CO2 boosts plant growth, making them larger, faster-growing and more drought tolerant with better roots. Steward calls that good news in a world with a growing population.
“When you’re deciding what ought to be done, think about what this could do for mankind,” he said.
Taking CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would degrade habitats and push people into starvation, Steward said.
“CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s the stuff of life. I can’t find anything that’s not beneficial,” he said. “This comes from thousands of studies – mainly from the agricultural community, and these are not casual observers.”
Spending billions and enacting draconian restrictions to fight a “pollutant” that’s not a pollutant isn’t helping anyone, he said.
“If we let our factories continue to manufacture, that’s not necessarily bad and might be good,” he said. “We (pro-CO2 groups) are greener than all the green organizations lobbying to reduce CO2.”
It’s a message scientists across the world are trying to promote, and Steward cited numerous studies.
When he started researching climate change four years ago, Steward found there are 18 “drivers” of climate change, including things like variation in the shape of the earth’s orbit, sunspots and the magnetic effect of the sun.
CO2’s ability to trap heat declines logarithmically, so a great deal of the gas makes a big difference, but as the level dips the difference it makes drops exponentially.
That means doubling the current concentration of CO2 would only make a .2 degree difference, he said.
If CO2 was a significant factor in global warming, temperatures would have risen – as modeling predicted – instead of declining since 2001.
“It’s hard to argue with that,” he said. “They did not predict in any of their models that it would be cooling.”
Since the Industrial Revolution, people have pumped CO2 into the atmosphere and temperature has generally risen, though not always.
“These are natural trends,” he said. “Look at the magnitude of climate variation. Huge swings of 10, 15, 20 degrees.”
Former vice president Al Gore got facts wrong in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Steward said.
“Clearly things were absolutely false in some cases and misleading in other cases,” he said.
For example, Gore said the earth was warming at an unprecedented rate. However, in the 1920s and ’30s, the temperature increase was more dramatic, Steward said.
Contrary to Gore’s findings, cyclone and tornado strength is actually down now, says Steward, a geologist and retired energy industry executive. He is a trustee at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and lives on the North Fork and in Texas.
Steward, the author of the best-seller “Sugar Busters,” recently published “Fire, Ice and Paradise” on climate change.
This summer, he organized a non-profit organization, “Plants Need CO2,” with the mission, “To educate the public on the positive effects of additional atmospheric CO2 and help prevent the inadvertent negative impact to human, plant and animal life if we reduce CO2.”
More than half the contributions to his group are from the coal industry, he said. CO2 is released during the burning of fossil fuels, among other sources.
“I’m not getting a penny for doing this,” he added. “It’s just something people of the earth ought to know.”
I read something in Science about the ultimate demise of life on earth from decreasing carbon dioxide levels, and spent quite a while searching for it. I didn’t find the exact article, but I found it referenced here:
California Institute of Technology (2009, June 13). Life May Extend Planet’s ‘Life’: Billion-year Life Extension For Earth Also Doubles Odds Of Finding Life On Other Planets. ScienceDaily. http://www.sciencedaily.com; /releases/2009/06/090612203303.htm
And I found this interesting blog, which also mentions the study I was looking for:
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/too-little-co2-end-life-earth
I think there’s a risk of doing real harm by trying to decrease CO2 levels in the atmosphere. One scheme I read about involved dumping iron into the ocean to fertilize it and encourage algae growth—who ever came up with that obviously was not around when it was discovered that algae growth fueled by phosphates was causing fish kills back in the 70s, which is why the use of phosphates in detergents was drastically reduced.
You never know. You might have planted a seed of doubt in one those people's minds. The problem with many libs is that they don't doubt what their leaders tell them. And they don't really dig much themselves. A little reality thrown into their faces might be a good thing.
Wow, an educated adult stating a simple fact we all learned in 4th grade Science...
IT’S MADNESS, I TELL YOU, UTTER MADNESS!
; )
Compared to Madoff, how many millions of dollars has Algore bilked for carbon credits?
That’s a pretty cool device!!
CO2 is good for the planet and Al Gore’s bank account, but it is not a polutant; it is essential for life.
Yeah, and our learned in the law Supreme Court has designated carbon dioxide as a pollutant. They are very poor scientists, though.
At that point, I realized this is a stacked game.
At the same time that the Vikings were flourishing (well a century or two later maybe) there is strong evidence that Marco Polo sailed an ice-free Arctic Ocean all the way over to Greenland. He “saw the Pole Star in the South” (by compass) according to one of his journals, and drew a map of the north coast of Canada. An iceless Arctic Ocean is not without precedent.
Next time you get into such a discussion, tell your friends that you KNOW a scientist personally who has been working on this subject for over a decade- me, who states flat out that the IPCC and the climate models are WRONG. In fact, one of the major climate modelers recently admitted they are wrong. I tell you that there are many more scientists who agree with me than with alGore; the IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific one. Tell them about the firestorms raging in the American Chemical Society due to their journal editor writing “science is settled” silliness. The American Physical Society is similarly under attack for their stupid philosophy. The Australians came over to consult with the US gov’t about the “science” and when they returned to Australia, they reversed their “climate change” CO2 restrictions because the science is so lacking. Japanese, Russian, Canadian, and many other nations are completely in disagreement with the IPCC.
Use me, a scientist you know who has studied the subject at length, for credibility.
Actually, it's UDDER madness! Too many people wanting to suckle at gubment's teat.
it’s UDDER madness!
*****
HA! OK, I’ll give you points for that one!
“CO2’s ability to trap heat declines logarithmically, so a great deal of the gas makes a big difference, but as the level dips the difference it makes drops exponentially.”
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This is a really poor way to write about this concept. Much more understandable to say:
“Since CO2’s ability to trap heat declines logarithmically, a SMALL amount of gas makes a big difference, but as the level RISES, the difference it makes declines dramatically. Right now, a complete doubling of CO2 (to 700ppm) will change the temperature by only 0.2C, and quadrupling it (to 1400ppm) will only change the temperature by 0.4C. Raising it all the way up to Earth’s historic maximum of 7000ppm can only raise the temperature by 0.9C.”
Ah, well, Congress is no better. There are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud going on in government programs and they investigate baseball and football.
Thanks for posting this! And thank you Leighton Steward for your obvious wisdom and common sense! Finally, a scientist who is actually a scientist and not a political hack looking for research grant money.
Experiences such as you describe inspired my latest tagline.
It seems like the process of using models to simulate climate is fundamentally flawed, how could an algorithm accurately simulate an entire planet’s climate?
It’s entirely based on the modeler’s assumption and biases, it’s not even remotely scientific.
“It’s not often you see the real truth spoken these days.”
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Two huge lies being spread are that carbon dioxide is a pollutant when the truth is all life would end withot it and that there are good and bad cholesterol when the truth is that no human could live without having both in his body. So how can one be good and one bad? I know the theory but it is very careless to call something bad when it is necessary for life.
It is a fact that a person can die from drinking too much water, are we going to start calling water bad or a pollutant?
I have actual experience with modeling complex physical systems. In my case, all the physical parameters of note are known to at least three significant digits of precision. We have no “free variables” to really “tune” the system. It is a nonlinear, chaotic system, a similar situation as Earth’s climate, though much simpler.
Finally, after many many years of working on the model, we manage to get it to match the result of our experiment, well, at least in substantial manners! Mind: we had a real opportunity to vary single parameters in the experiment which greatly helped our ability to eliminate faulty program assumptions.
Based on the model, we changed the size and shape of the physical structure in a rather minor way. The parameters we had to change were all known to at least FOUR significant digits of precision, and most were FIVE or more. Spent a lot of time and money building the new chamber based on the model. UTTER FAILURE! Years later- we still don’t know why. We will have to rebuilt the whole model.
This system is probably only one percent of the complexity of Earth’s climate system. The important parameters in the climate are CERTAINLY not all known. Many of those known are only vaguely understood, and the precision with which we can measure them is often not known with even two digits of precision. There are literally thousands of parameters that are adjusted by the modelers to get the results that even vaguely represent Earth’s system.
I tell alarmist females that I could use the climate models to design the dress they are wearing now, including all the folds when they are standing up or sitting, by adjusting the free parameters in the GCM’s. I’m not joking about that, either.
Ping for truth!
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