The Earth Is Getting Greener, Not Browner -- Thanks To Minimally Increased Atmospheric CO2 -- Scientists -- May 1, 2016 -- Part I Of II Parts On Global Warming Today

Updates

May 5,2 016: this is link for additional material on how increased atmospheric CO2 will lead to "better" crops. Regardless of whether there is anthropogenic global warming, the wrong questions are being asked.

Original Post

Part II is here. 

Rising CO2, according to the warmists, will do only four things that are "of concern":

• raise atmospheric CO2 (naturally)
• raise global temperature 2.0 degrees over the next 100 years
• raise sea level 2.0 feet along some coasts
• further acidify the ocean

I can't speak to the fourth issue, but I haven't seen many stories on ocean acidification in the past three years. Like the polar bear, the coral issue seems to have been hyped.

For many of us who grew up along the northern tier (of the United States), we have yet to see the downside of our average winter temperature going from forty degrees below zero to 38 degrees below zero. On both the Fahrenheit scale and the Celsius scale, -40 degrees is the same.

If local, state, and federal governments AND the insurance industry were concerned about rising sea levels along the coasts, zoning restrictions should be put in place: restrict all new building to account for a receding sea coast, and start to enact new requirements on older real estate along the coasts to prepare for rising sea levels.

And now finally, the reason I brought this up.

Back in 1972, I spent a summer in Alaska -- Barrow, Alaska, to be precise -- at a laboratory there, studying the efficiency of Arctic grasses in utilizing CO2. It was understood that Arctic grasses were more efficient at utilizing CO2 than grasses (e.g., corn) in South Dakota.

The lead researcher felt that if one could transfer that efficiency to corn grown in Iowa, the average cornstalk would be one foot higher and produce six ears of corn instead of the average three for the same amount of soil, nitrogen, and water.

A few years ago I received, unexpectedly, a packet from that lead researcher with all my original notes, etc. He would have been about 20 years older than I, so if I was 60, he was about 80. He was probably cleaning out his garage now that it was unlikely he was going to win the Nobel Prize in Science. My hunch is he failed to put together an "Algore" PowerPoint Presentation. He was way ahead of the rest of the pack when it came to CO2 but that came with a downside: he figured it out before Microsoft released PowerPoint. In fact, he figured it out before Bill Gates was born.

But I digress.

I say all that to say this: Hey! Wouldn't it be easier to simply raise the atmospheric CO2 rather than use GMO (which everyone hates and the EU and Kenya are trying to ban) to increase the corn yield in Iowa?

A reader sent this "cut and paste" from CO2 Science:

(Since 1980) the air's CO2 content increased by 16%, while human population grew by 55%. So just how bad is the biosphere suffering in response to these much-feared events? Or, is it even suffering at all?

A new paper by Zhu et al. (2016) provides valuable insight into this important topic.

Noting that global environment change is rapidly altering the dynamics of terrestrial vegetation, Zhu et al. set about to discover just how significant this phenomenon is, as well as what has primarily been responsible for it.

This they did using three long-term satellite-derived leaf area index (LAI) records, together with the output of ten global ecosystem models, which they employed to study four key drivers of LAI trends (atmospheric CO2 enrichment, nitrogen deposition, climate change and land cover change) over the period 1982-2009. And what did this effort reveal?

The 32 researchers -- representing 9 different countries (Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom) -- report finding "a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning)."

And equally importantly, they report that "factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (4%)."

Could one hope for anything more promising than this? Quite the opposite of what the world's climate alarmists contendshould be happening to Earth's vegetation, rising atmospheric CO2 enrichment is proving to be a tremendous biospheric benefit, overpowering the many real and negative influences that society and nature have inflicted upon it over the past three decades, as shown in the figure below.

By the way, before you get your tighty whities in a twist, that "16% increase in atmospheric CO2" sounds dreadful doesn't it. Sixteen percent. OMG. That's sixteen times more than the GDP growth rate under the Obama administration.

Okay, hold your horses. Let's run the numbers. CO2 make up 400 parts per million in the atmosphere. Put a million atmospheric molecules in your coffee cup, and remove 400 of them. What do you have? A cup that is still full of 999,600 molecules, assuming I did the arithmetic correctly.

Now grab another cup, and put another million molecules in that cup and remove (400 x 1.16 = ) 464 molecules and what do you have? You still have a cup with 999,536 molecules, assuming I did all the steps correctly.

But I digress. Again.

The point of the story is this: the little bit of extra CO2 is not being felt by anyone except the plants and they're lovin' it. 

With this almost negligible rise in atmospheric CO2, the earth is getting greener, and less brown. Another century or two and the Sahara Rain Forest will be a tourist destination.

Algore's great-great-great grandchildren will be taking big game hunters to southern Libya on Hawking Airlines using MuskMelon rocket technology.