The Doom message version 48.2a (subclause i) has been released.
Forget methane clathrate pits, now extra plant growth (blame CO2) could cause global soil to unleash massive amounts of carbon.
Carbon dioxide (aka “pollution”) feeds plants. This is now bad (didn’t you know?). An all new “first” computer model with plants, soil, and fungus, warns us that more plants could get soil microbes excited which might break down more soil carbon and release it into the air. Disaster! It’s a could-be-might-be-catastrophe. (At least until paragraph 6 — see that caveat below.)
In the meantime this is is so big, it’s practically nuclear — the model reports that it could set off a “chain reaction”:
An increase in human-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could initiate a chain reaction between plants and microorganisms that would unsettle one of the largest carbon reservoirs on the planet — soil.
Did you know there is twice as much CO2, carbon in the soil as there is in Earth’s whole atmosphere?
Researchers based at Princeton University report in the journal Nature Climate Change that the carbon in soil — which contains twice the amount of carbon in all plants and Earth’s atmosphere combined — could become increasingly volatile as people add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, largely because of increased plant growth. The researchers developed the first computer model to show at a global scale the complex interaction between carbon, plants and soil, which includes numerous bacteria, fungi, minerals and carbon compounds that respond in complex ways to temperature, moisture and the carbon that plants contribute to soil.
(The “first”? Dr David Evans tells me that FullCAM — the Australian carbon accounting model he helped develop — did this on an Australian scale years ago, and that they weren’t the first then.)
Note the politically-correct permitted phrasing next:
Although a greenhouse gas and pollutant, carbon dioxide also supports plant growth.
So after 500 million years of evolution of carbon based life-forms, carbon dioxide is first and foremost a greenhouse gas, secondly it’s a pollutant, but but… it does… “support” plant growth. (Could we make that weaker? Plants need CO2 so desperately that they suck out all the stuff they can get before morning tea, then they stop growing — and the way to describe this is that CO2 “supports” them — like a tomato stake, right?)
As trees and other vegetation flourish in a carbon dioxide-rich future, their roots could stimulate microbial activity in soil that in turn accelerates the decomposition of soil carbon and its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the researchers found.
Note the researchers found a “could”.
The next two paragraphs tell us how useful this work is — not for predicting the natural world necessarily — but for countering that annoying idea that plants might be a net sink of carbon:
This effect counters current key projections regarding Earth’s future carbon cycle, particularly that greater plant growth could offset carbon dioxide emissions as flora take up more of the gas, said first author Benjamin Sulman, who conducted the modeling work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Princeton Environmental Institute.
“You should not count on getting more carbon storage in the soil just because tree growth is increasing,” said Sulman, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University.
Then there’s the killer caveat (maybe most readers won’t get this far). This is a doozy:
On the other hand, microbial activity initiated by root growth could lock carbon onto mineral particles and protect it from decomposition, which would increase long-term storage of carbon in soils, the researchers report.
So more plants with more roots will definitely cause bacteria to release more CO2 except if they don’t.
But seriously, this is a really good model. It’s complex, it must be right:
Whether carbon emissions from soil rise or fall, the researchers’ model depicts an intricate soil-carbon system that contrasts starkly with existing models that portray soil as a simple carbon repository, Sulman said. An oversimplified perception of the soil carbon cycle has left scientists with a glaring uncertainty as to whether soil would help mitigate future carbon dioxide levels — or make them worse, Sulman said.
How lucky we are that the glaring uncertainty is resolved… I mean, might-be could-be settled.
The researchers’ soil-carbon cycle model has been integrated into the global land model used for climate simulations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) located on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus.
Settled enough for NOAA – give us another grant.
Settled enough for Nature Climate Change.
REFERENCE
Sulman, et al (2014) Microbe-driven turnover offsets mineral-mediated storage of soil carbon under elevated CO2. Nature Climate Change; 4 (12): 1099 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2436
What, with the beavers, the squirrels, the termites and now the plants, what it all boils down to, for the enviroloons, is that the only way to save this planet is to destroy all life-forms on it. Problem solved. I do wish these eco-nutters would lead by example, though.
Oh, yes – and Merry Chrimbo to you all, from mild and sunny Greece.
Bah! Humbug.
522
Well the conclusions to be drawn from this model seem to be uncertain, but I’m a risk averse person, therefore I think the precautionary principal must prevail here. My strategy?; well, all the shrubs and trees in my garden, out they come, all those pretty flowers feigning innocence and joy, good riddance to you. As for the vegetable garden; Reg Mombassa from the band Mental as Anything had a great method for the lazy gardener, concrete the whole back yard and before it sets, draw vegetables in the concrete for a permanent low maintenance solution. Well we can’t use concrete anymore but no matter, I will wait until my back yard has turned to dust then draw vegies and flowers in the silt and pretend I am gardening. See, there’s a solution to every problem if you really put your mind to it.
160
The possible cause is a fungus Desperatus greeni which gets infected by a virus Noncompos mentis and then tries to breakdown the structure of the Earth around it.
201
Developed…a model to show…
The flockers continue their rant….
242
Great magic stuff, himfella plenty-plenty not settled yet.
401
And if this concept had a shred of truth in it, we would clearly see it in the geological record.
So, do we see it there? Maybe on the planet Zarg.
Just another example of those on the left of politics and their obsession with, “Does it work in theory”, but rarely, “Does it work in practice?”
Also, another classic example of today’s climate science in action, where the models are always allowed to trump reality.
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Looks like a warmist preemptive attempt (though as always with these thoughtless science redactors a little late) at countering the apparent reality that a fair bit more CO2 in the atmosphere is having a positive effect on increasing plant growth. Which weighed against the increasingly faint possibility of CAGW is a real winner for a better life on Earth.
Scientists? Oh yeah. Pull the other one. Activists pure and simple.
50
Vaguely plausible doomsday scenarios are very popular, but you have to come up with one.
So wow! Twice as much CO2 in the soil as the air and we should worry? So? Even warmists agree there is 50x as much free CO2 in the oceans and who mentions that? Even a tiny amount of ocean warming would increase CO2 levels as CO2 came out of solution. Gosh! That would explain everything, but who wants a simple explanation when we can imagine a man made disaster caused by greedy capitalist exploitation by democratic governments? (Don’t mention China who are blameless)
In all these peacetime disaster scenarios, the fundamental Chemistry concept of equilibrium is utterly ignored because non science people have never heard of it. However without equilibrium and conservation of atoms, chemistry does not exist and our world is in inexplicable chaos. So in these apocalyptic scenarios, everything is unstable and even a slight change leads to a tipping point leads to Armageddon. In reality, most system are very stable with the balance worked out over billions of years and for every perturbation, there is a balancing equilibrium force. Not if you want funding though. We are all going to die, unless you urgently send money to the UN.
For example, when before in human history have local governments worried about the shape of the coastline in 100 years time and banned housing and pushed insurance rate through the roof? What about all the houses on Mt. Vesuvius in Italy or along the California coast or the 50 million who live near sea level in Bangladesh? No, it is all about money. Lord Monckton’s profiteers of Doom. The only doomed species facing imminent extinction is the IPCC.
542
Actually they said “carbon” in the soil. So they’re comparing apples to rocks.
70
The Jar Jar Binks of the carbon cycle.
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“Mesa got lotsa money for makin a clumsy theory!”
140
Well, geez, desperate times need desperate measures, the whole global warming scare mongering campaign is falling apart, it doesn’t even rate in the msm headlines anymore, for heaven’s sake SkS can’t get a nibble on an article that mentions Jonova… so that means things must be mighty desperate for the bedwetters to try and pull this chestnut out of the fire.
Let me check the old Emergency Operations and Procedures Manual… Satire – check, Irony – check, Sarcasm – use as last resort – check, but I’m pretty sure I never, ever had to use Sarcasm to restrain a crazy theory, cause like normally it as the Manual says, a last resort… right, so lets look for a final, last resort… nope, not here, can’t find it, isn’t even entered under Escalation of the Use of Farce… I just can’t find ‘Bl00dy Ridiculous’ as a justification for an act of last, final, and total desperation… and this is the silly season.
Bunch of bedwetting, dead monkeys, wonder what they’ll come up with next as a cause for global warming?
I think I’ll just add it to the sh#t that causes cancer… that list is much shorter.
362
They missed “the biggy”
Releasing extra CO2 into the carbon cycle speeds up that cycle,
The more we add , the faster the cycle goes.
So if we add too much more CO2, we’ll firstly get very dizzy,
then get thrown out of the cycle by centrifugal forces.
You know that makes sense !! 🙂
414
I though more CO2 just made everything bubblier and kept the lobster tails I got for Christmas frozen whilst in the mail?
20
So they are calling C02 a pollutant, but supports plant growth, then they might get a grant to study poop, as it is also a pollutant and supports plant growth. But I suggest not using the word poop when applying for the grant.
300
They could refer to it as excretal evidence.
330
Sounds like crap to me ……….
70
That was the point of the joke.
20
Yep. It was a crap joke.
I’m off out…
00
Plants aren’t coprophytes in general, but there’s no doubt, as any gardner will tell us, the addition of animal dung to soil as a fertiliser has beneficial effects on growth.
Such ‘publish without thinking’ behaviour is likely to provoke a widespread outburst of coprolalia in the audience.
90
New age science at its best
280
The saddest part of all this stupidity is that the universities don’t care about their reputations as long as the grants (overhead) keep coming. Both Princeton and Indiana were good universities years ago. What kind of education are they providing now. I’m an old guy, but I COULD LIVE to 175 to check this out.
252
With what I have been reading about nanobots you may well get there.
30
This bloke got a PhD for this tosh? It used to be that those doing psychiatry could get away with rubbish if they dressed it up enough. Seems that science is now just another branch of make believe. It is sad but what I find even more sad is that real scientists are not objecting to this sort of rubbish (present company excepted). Mind you our present and former Chief Scientists were both accepting of biased science and both tried their darnedest to stifle debate. I do hope Tony Abbott appoints a half decent scientist to the job when the time comes. The way he’s been going lately don’t be surprised if he doesn’t give it Tim Flannery to suck up to the left again.
20
It sounds vaguely immoral to me that plant roots should stimulate microbial activity in the privacy of their own soil.
But, that aside, we need to consider how lucky we are that the glaring uncertainty is resolved… I mean, something might-be could-be settled. There again, we might never know. But at least we have found an uncertainty, that we were previously not sure about.
Any way, I don’t know about you, but I am glad that we have found yet more evidence that academic modellers should be constantly supervised when playing with small swallowable objects. I just hope their supervisor made sure that they put the lego away, when they had finished their “modelling”.
400
Much like the children of today I’ve observed a trend in pro-CAGW scientists where ‘acting out’ is concerned, I’m applying for a study grant and with great certainty will find most of these naughty scientists will either have: ADD, ADHD, Autism, Aspergers, you’ll notice they all start with ‘A’, this is no coincidence, so as a whole set of disorders starting with ‘A’ I’ve named this ‘CAGW A-Whole Syndrome’.
This condition is identifiable amongst scientists with signs of : extreme overconfidence, smugness, childish outbursts, incoherent work results, susceptibility to cultish ideals, obsessive epidemiology, eugenicist undertones and many more I will explain in my book.
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I will look forward to reading it.
Are you also going to address the urgent need for a cure, or treatment, for epidemiology, which seems to be reaching epidemic proportions within climate modelling circles.
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Considering the Eugenicist trait I’m sure they will accept treatment that will achieve a final solution…..
121
Drat, I was going to recommend giving them marbles to play with as they seem to have lost theirs.
30
Just a suggestion to the researchers…
If you wanted to go and see what plants do in higher CO2 environments..
You could have actually gone and done the study and some actual research…
in a GreenHouse !!!
423
🙂 PERFECT suggestion the Griss. 🙂 🙂 :-).
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Yes, so why would they put extra CO2 into greenhouses when the plants can evidently do it all on their own?
161
Or if they are too lazy, CO2 science has already been there. Fodder grass across the north of Australia, Buffel Grass shows a huge increase with extra CO2. Hundreds more examples too.
90
My question is;
What’s with all the “computer modeling”? What happened to real research, like you say Griss, get into a green house and measure stuff?
My boss would not be happy if I “computer modelled” a chemical analysis on a sample and presented modelled results instead of actually doing a assay and presented REAL results.
R-COO- K+
161
All these ‘sexy’ models reminds me of this http://vimeo.com/29719494
31
I’m too sexy for my lab, too sexy for my lab, too sexy for my lab – atory.
I’m too sexy for the truth, too sexy for the truth, and so I tell a – story.
…
260
Too funny!
70
I make models, you know what I do?
I take what little I earn from the public.
Yeah from the public, yeah,
I take what little I earn from the public.
I’m too SREX-y for mild storms.
Too SREXy for mild storms.
So SREXy economy needs re-forms.
…
31
Factsheet:
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture , Food and Rural Affairs
Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses
Introduction
The benefits of carbon dioxide supplementation on plant growth and production within the greenhouse environment have been well understood for many years.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an essential component of photosynthesis (also called carbon assimilation).
Photosynthesis is a chemical process that uses light energy to convert CO2 and water into sugars in green plants.
These sugars are then used for growth within the plant, through respiration.
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
~ ~ ~
April most polluted month in history says Climate Central
“The end of April has arrived, and with it, the record for the first month in human history with an average carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere above 400 parts per million has been set,” said climatecentral.org.”
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/2014/04/30/april-most-polluted-month-in-history-says-climate-central_8928cf63-924e-4ca3-99fd-ec901b626606.html
. . .
Only one of these is ‘junk science’.
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Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda…
Its the intro chant of the Cult of Calamitous Climate.
We know nothing but we can pretend to be so certain.
Religion at its finest.
Well 2015 shall be entertaining.
No Coulda,woulda, shouda about it.
Its time to release the next terror meme, Due to ocean neutralization the chalk of the White Cliffs of Dover are going to react with sea water releasing Giga tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, giving planets a massive advantage in the life struggle, soon the trees shall march forth seeking to avenge all past insults from fire and steel…
We are doomed, doomed.. unless you give me all your money to “negotiate” with the trees before they mobilize.
I am now convinced that the only sane way to deal with these gullible fools and the bandits who feed upon their fears is derision and [SNIP, peaceful solutions only thanks – jo].
They understand neither logic nor basic ethics.
Banishment and pain are the only inputs that seem to get past their delusional righteousness as they interfere endlessly into other persons affairs.
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The capacity of the plants to avenge themselves is much overrated. I have discovered it is possible even for humans to eat plants, provided they are overwhelmed with sufficient quantities of butter and salt.
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And BACON
70
Yes- all bacon is good for helping those agressive weeds to slide down, but mainly the white part.
10
So Tolkien was right. It is the small band of the Frodo deniers marching with the trees to defeat scientific orcs of IPPC
70
Plants.planets… so much for preview.
30
The results of this ‘research’ show one of the problems that arses when basing a scientific experiment on reductionist thinking. The reductionist idea in an experiment is where you have to reduce the number of variables under consideration to just two. (Under the reductionist line of experiment, the best case is two but, if you can’t get it down to two, then as few as possible variables).
Another way of expressing the reductionist idea is the Latin phrase ‘certeris paribus’ – meaning ‘other things being held equal’. Now, I am not, overall, critical of the reductionist method or the ceteribus paribus technique in the scientific method. It is an absolutely essential technique in working out specific relationships between limited numbers of variables. To be fair, the use of scientific and mathematical models recognises the problems inherent in reductionist thinking. Models attempt to expand the variables out ad infinitum but, as readers of these pages are all too well aware, people then make the mistake of thinking that the models themselves are the science.
The problem with reductionism and ceteribus paribus comes when the experimenter fails to see that, in the broader picture of nature and science, there are more than a limited number of variables. A problem arises when the experimenter fails to see the full context and then reports the result of the reductionist experiment in a way that ‘this explains everything’.
Another term that is used generally for the problems arising from reductionism and ceteribus paribus is the term ‘silo thinking’ – people, academics, scientists, researchers, and so on, think in their own silos and have difficulty thinking across to include other silos.
In the case of this reported ‘research’ involving labile soil carbon, my view is that the researchers have found nothing at all but have had to report something. And they have – albeit bound about by a comprehensive set of caveats that mean that the ‘researchers’ can never really be held to account for what they have surmised. Their work is pure chatter and fails to see the broader picture that all the labile carbon in the soil profile is all part of the atmospheric carbon cycle.
120
So Peter Spencer was just ahead of his time.
40
I thought all this was “well-understood” and the energy balance of the earth so well-researched that you could bet the mortgage on its accuracy. Now we’re hearing about squirrels, and termites and “an oversimplified perception of the soil carbon cycle has left scientists with a glaring uncertainty” about where all the carbon is stored?? This is looking more and more like a giant sieve with leaks everywhere. If this is understanding, I fear finding out what ignorance is.
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It may look very similar Sheri.
100
I hope it’s only the surface looks and things change when you dig a bit further. Note I said “hoped”.
50
If this study has been integrated into NOAA’s global land model used for climate simulations and contains all these uncertainties, then the final “climate simulation” output must contain one more level of uncertainty, yeah?
50
I remember a study, about a year ago now, than basically said that if you add all the models together and average them, the result is more certain than any one model. Put another way, if you add up all the uncertainty and average it, it is a better estimate than any one of the models. I remember it copped a howling by this this audience.
10
Of course it copped a howling.
There is ONE earth and one and only one model is ‘the best fit’ Therefore all the other models are ‘more wrong’ than ‘the best fit’ model.
If I measure a board to be cut using ‘cubits,’ with a tape marked only in meters, a tape marked only in feet, a tape marked only in inches, and a tape marked only in millimeters,’ do I have a better estimate of the ‘true value’ with the measurements averaged or with the single measurement using the tape marked in millimeters?
00
Given that we now know the size of the termite population, from a previous post on this site, I am extremely concerned that, if they all by chance face in the same direction, and all release methane gas simultaneously, they could shift the earth out of its orbit.
We need to increase taxation, so we can channel funds into research, that is specifically designed to address the urgent need for study into ways of ameliorating and mitigating or reducing termite flatulence.
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Not only that . .
If this extra ‘disturbed’ CO2 causes more plant growth, then termite populations will increase to take advantage of the increase in available food . . . studies have shown! 😉
Before 2100 this self sustaining model will reach a critical mass whereby one errant spark and the whole planet goes POOF.
And James Hansen already told us the oceans “will begin to boil” . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxfiuKB_R8
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Having worked in the pest management industry all my working life, I can inform you that it is quie easy to get termites to face in one direction; just build a wooden framed house to one side of their nest. So …… If we were to build another such house on the OTHER side of the nest half would go the other way this neutralising the effect of directional flatulance …. Perhaps ….. Maybe ……. Might…….. Just saying.
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I was thinking about supporting plants this season but they are rebuilding and won’t make the play-offs. Maybe next year…
70
Unfortunately they get it wrong with this statement: ” microbial activity initiated by root growth”
It’s actually the other way around. Microbial activity makes the nutrition available to the plants to grow – without it plants can have all the CO2 they like but still will have impeded growth.
It’s beautifully explained in this episode of the Gourmet Farmer where they produce two identical vegetable gardens – they then add microorganisms to one of the gardens – the difference is perfectly clear. The microbial garden produces plants twice the size and better tasting.
The Gourmet Farmer episode
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But but but…that’s empirical evidence janama!!!
That would mean admitting that farmers understand stuff about plants better than ‘environmental scientists’ !!!!!
🙂
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No, it means the average plant is smarter at living than a climate scientist is making (up) a model.
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“That would mean admitting that farmers understand stuff…”
Purdue University (West Lafayette Indiana) Study: Farmers and scientists divided over climate change
So 92% of the farmers surveyed think CAGW is hog wash. Shows those in the real world have a better grasp of reality compared to the Ivory Tower dwellers.
00
Yeah, so full of holes it should be distributed to every university faculty…would make a great tea strainer!
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Janama, indeed, I wrote about that here “Growing trees 40% faster with the help of the right bacteria and fungi”
Then I found some and bought it for my garden.
I don’t know what difference it made because I beefed up the fertilizer as well and have no controls. But our fig tree doubled in size in a year.
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A good compost will also have a lot of these fungi and worms etc in it. 🙂
30
So do you now give two figs … ?
60
Yes, Jo, they may be some sort of scientists, but clearly not agricultural scientists! I am, and I know that they, as they would say in Scotland, have got it “all erse aboot face”. It is totally the wrong way around; the microbial content of the soil is vital for plant growth and is not “stimulated” by plants growing, no matter at what speed. What utter nonsense!
By the way, your fig tree has stimulated me to get some of that stuff you got to, in turn, stimulate my young orchard of three apple, one pear and two hazel nut trees. I’ll report back in due course!
70
Gee Jo, I hope you didn’t plant the fig anywhere near your house. Figs are notorious for breaking into sewer pipes and cracking house foundations.
Have transplanted big ones over the years, biggest being around twenty metres high. Used them in parks and golf courses as not recommended for house blocks.
You say you have no controls. Perth sand is the ultimate media to control growth (nutrient uptake). Putting greens are sand as to control nutrients, mostly nitrogen is used to ensure green-ness but negligible growth.
Tree height times two and a half root spread. Either have root barrier installed or put a chainsaw through it to ensure no damage.
31
I’m always astounded that people in Perth can get ANYTHING to grow in that poor excuse for soil you have there, well, except for the Dampiers anyway. Strangest stuff I ever came across, how do you ever get it to hold any water! Roses do seem to like it though.
10
I might be a bit thick but where is all the moisture coming from for this soil carbon, plant growth chain reaction? Plants don’t grow in dry soils no matter how much carbon is present.
00
You rotter – that site will not allow the programme to be viewed outside Australia! Talk about teasing…
00
Look out, a UNVALIDATED THEORETICAL soil model says more plants means massive carbon stores might be freed
Fixed it.
82
So! first “Could”: Disaster! Hell Fire and Brimstone!! Big HEADLINE!! We are all Ging to DIE!!
Second “Could”: we are living in Paradise Gaia is very happy! We Dont Mention this “Could” that contradicts the first one.
I was trying to explain, to one of my acquaintances, why I’m such a skeptic. This is the perfect example.
92
I have often thought that red flowering trees & plants should start a political movement in support of CO2. They could demonize oxygen as an overproduced waste product and blame all the other trees & plants that have different coloured flowers for the overproduction of oxygen…and tax them.
They could also farm humans as an excellent source of CO2.
🙂
170
Especially the middle aged, male white flowers, the roots of all evil.
40
Save us Algoremanbearpig from the global climate warming manmade cooling change! Hep! Hep!
52
One of the basic fundamental approaches used in science is to formulate a hypothesis which seems to fit the available evidence. Then devise and experiment to test the hypothesis and carry out that experiment. If the results of the experiment are positive and if the experiment is sufficiently encompassing and conclusive one is entitled to make that work available for more public scrutiny. But here it would appear those involved have come up with a hypothesis which is not based on any evidence that needed explaining, did not devise or carry out any experiment to test their hypothesis and simply declared it MIGHT be true (the good old precautionary principle again). I can think of a very simple experiment already carried out with known results. According to their theory more plant growth means less soil carbon. Now at current rates of plant growth there is little long term accumulation of carbon in the soil so how did all the soil carbon we now term “fossil fuel” get to be deposited? Was there even less plant growth than today during the age of dinosaurs and that’s why so much could get sequestered into to soil for our convenience? Funny, all the scenarios I have read suggest plant growth at the time was exceptionally lush. Maybe the deserts where plant growth is almost non existent are the sites of future fossil fuel reserves (in a few million years of course!). Did the authors not even carry out this MOST BASIC thought experiment, the most basic really check? Apparently not. It’s like the undergraduate asked to calculate the power output of a power station who comes up with the result 4 micro watts and insists its right because that’s what the maths says. These are the ones you fervently hope will find some different career in life.
Some theories are so naive and absurd that they fall down at even the simplest application of logic. This is the sort of thing peer review is supposed to weed out but as we are seeing it doesn’t. I have a solution, apply peer review in the same way the patent office does! Those reviewers are called patent examiners. They are paid and most importantly they are accountable! And believe me, as someone who has taken a large number of patents those guys really are on the ball.
I wonder what would happen if we held reviewers to account. It’s simple to do, legislate that scientific reviews of a paper and the name of the reviewers MUST be published along with the paper. If it turns out the paper had glaring errors or poor science that was not picked up that will automatically reflect on the reviewer as well as the original author. This concept of all care no responsibility and rigorously maintained anonymity clearly does not work.
332
“legislate that scientific reviews of a paper and the name of the reviewers MUST be published along with the paper. ”
I mentioned this on a thread a week or two ago.
Keep the identification of the reviewers secret until publication..
But when the paper hits the press, the reviewers names and affiliations should be published.
This way, circular pal-review practices would soon be weeded out, as would skim reading etc.
292
They forgot to extrapolate their findings.
First based on this study, plants will grow more as they suck down all the available CO2:
And the result?
Well the result is shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7SkrYF8lCU
61
Oh another simple test, according to them increased plant growth leads to more not less atmospheric CO2. So that would imply less plant growth leads to less CO2. SO we could fix the rising CO2 in our atmosphere by spraying the planet with agent orange! Hey, maybe that we we could even drive the CO2 level negative, even better. Saints preserve us, what have I said, they are just crazy enough to actually advocate for this suggestion. (OK sarc off)
But think about it, even the simplest test of logic shows that their hypothesis is untenable. They are clearly so wrapped up in their abstract simulations with invented coefficients that they are now incapable of seeing the wood for the trees. Trouble is, there should be others who are able to say STOP and THINK but in this discipline it would appear no one is.
231
This is SCIENCE today, folks!
We’ve Lost!
The Lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.
202
What. only three lines..
Where is the real ROM !! 🙂
111
ROM “the succinct” he shall be known as!
100
Veni Vidi Vini
I came, I saw, I had a Chardonnay.
160
I always liked Heinlein’s assertion that the original Latin was garbled and the correct translation was “I came, I saw, she conquered.”
20
I had a ‘Dago Red’
10
“They seek him here,
they seek him there,
those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel.”
70
Yet another feedback mechanism. The permafrost one didn’t work; the melting ice one didn’t work; the drought induced ecosystem die-off one didn’t work; the methane released from the seabed one didn’t work; and the albedo effect one didn’t work … so let’s shop around for another one. Ah, the soil. We haven’t tried that one before.
Clearly there is another ‘tipping point’ in play here. Don’t you love the loaded language the Left use: ‘tipping point, ‘energy in the atmosphere’ and the heat hiding in the ‘deep oceans’ – not ‘deep in the oceans’ but ‘deep oceans’, to give it a menacing sound. It is done deliberately to trigger the fear of the unknown that we have carried in our genes since the day we huddled in our caves having nightmares about the demons outside in the dark. Quick everyone, run and huddle in your cave, there’s a boogie man lurking in the deep oceans, and he’s using a feedback mechanism to create a tipping point right outside our cave.
Hollywood has made a fortune from disaster films that exploit our primitive fears. It seems that Hollywood is not the only crowd who are onto it.
181
As rapidly increasing metathesiophobia resistance energy spreads from reality hiding in the deep mass consiousness, positive feedback could result in a sudden tipping point. The fear monger funding crash.
Embrace change it will save you change.
50
Deep oceans, ha!
I was having a spat with some alarmists the other day and they pointed to a graph that shows extra heat accumulating in the deep ocean.
The graph was based on Legates et al.
I simply asked them to show me a graph using real data 🙂
50
For the Latin scholars:
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. For gods, plural, the Promethius version applies.
Here are selected excerpts from an article “The Gods Have Made Them Mad” from American Thinker on the way establishment thinking has become the opposite of rational, scientific and well reasoned:
“It used to strike me as impossible for global warming to cause cold weather. Then I realized that I could chill a soft drink in the oven if there were no room left in the refrigerator to bake a cake.
Up until then I did not know that the same cause can have opposite effects. In my unenlightened state, it never occurred to me that carbon dioxide could cause both excessive heat and excessive cold, both drought and flood”
“Not so long ago, most people believed that God controlled the weather. Now the scientific establishment believes, or at least pretends to believe, that warm weather, cold weather, floods, and droughts are caused by carbon dioxide released into the air by the burning of fossil fuels, that, in other words, human beings control the weather. They think that we can prevent the climate from changing on a planet that has had billions of years of changing climates. The scientific establishment has put humanity on the throne once nigh universally said to belong to God”.
“Of course, these scientists believe that hot, cold, wet, and dry are great evils, more deadly than nuclear warfare and nerve gas attacks…..”
” So they are confused, but we could hardly expect otherwise from people who think that the same thing causes opposite effects.”
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/the_gods_have_made_them_mad.html#ixzz3N2ZRFiXy
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
140
What, no mention of the increased effect of the Nitrogen Cycle due to CO2 in degrading the extra Carbon fixed in the soil???
Brisbane is receiving a nitrogen boost today by rain. Rain is superior for plant growth because of this. Irrigated cropping requires nitrogen fertilisation to attain similar yields. Standard application is in the form of a NPK mix.
Does this cough, cough, ‘Scientific’ treatise mention the effect of the Nitrogen Cycle…or Gaia forbid the Hydrogen Cycle and the interaction that enhances, neutralises carbon fixed in soils?
If not it is junk!
131
So true
Their Model has got so few parameters, and they do a GLOBAL model to predict that CO2 will escalate with more plants
Can’t even see why Nature published this
Oh, wait
It was in “Nature Climate Change” so anything is allowed I suppose
40
Jo,
FYI
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/we-dont-need-no-473.html#comments
Links to Bjorn Lomborg at
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#Gvx4I1542wwdu4M6.99
00
Not wishing to be unnecessarily alarmist, oxygen is corrosive and slowly killing us.
100
But isn’t oxygen depleting ?
I know that when I go out in a 6ft surf, there is one heck of a lot less oxygen out there than when I was younger !!
101
Posted this before by the Chiefio on CO2-eating-plants:
‘ A fast forest species like Poplar or Eucalyptus can
completely deplete about twice as much volume of air as
sits above the forest,(all the way to space,) and a
fertile pond growing pond scum could completely deplete
about 20 times the volume of air as sits above it. In
one year.’
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/of-trees-volcanos-and-pond-scum/
70
So now we have holes in the atmosphere, sitting above ponds, and forests? Great! How in Hades are we expected to tax that?
190
They did it with fines for CFC’s to “fix” the “hole” in the “ozone layer.” They will find a new and better way to tax dirt. (When that fails the trees and ponds will be next because they’re obviously our fault.)
00
Where has all the carbon gone, long time passing. The greedy plants have nearly eaten the lot, long time ago.
While we are very grateful for the Oxygen, as plants lack a communist Green government, they are selfishly gobbling all the CO2 until they are near starvation. Consumerism gone wild.
Humans came along just in time to return Natural Coal and Natural oil and Natural Gas, old rotted plant matter to the atmosphere and prevent mass starvation of Green vegetation. Mankind is greening the planet as admitted even by the CSIRO, but what will we do when the world runs out of old plant matter? The trees and grasses and pond scum and wheat and corn and animals will die and so will we. Still, while we have natural coal to burn, let’s Green the planet. Then if we are very lucky, we might even prevent another ice age. The last one nearly killed everyone, long time passing.
130
Yep, the main issue is that carbon is always being taken OUT of the short term carbon cycle ….
particularly by crustaceans in the ocean as they die and sink to the bottom.
We simply must keep de-sequestering carbon deposits just to keep up and keep the carbon cycle going.
The carbon cycle stops.. That’s the end… fin.. kaput !!
That is what makes the CO2-demonisation agenda so absolutely stupid!!
70
Fortunately, thx ter Ol’ King Coal et al,(not AL,)
the deserts are greening. Need ter keep CO2 above
that 220ppm level where plant growth starts ter
become threatened.
http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2.aspx
40
Griss – “…We simply must keep de-sequestering carbon deposits just to keep up and keep the carbon cycle going.
The carbon cycle stops.. That’s the end… fin.. kaput !!….”
….
That is the long and the short of it. We need CO2 levels raised back up to between 1500 ppm to 2000 ppm. And any honest scientist would see that.
If these studies are correct the earth was skirting the hairy edge during the Wisconsin Ice Age. One point no one brings up is lack of adequate CO2 inhibits growth and increases the time to fruiting and reproduction. Not good when the next glaciation happens or even the next Little Ice Age.
Carbon dioxide starvation, the development of C4 ecosystems, and mammalian evolution
Impact of lower atmospheric carbon dioxide on tropical mountain ecosystems
Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California.
00
Just incase anyone missed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOQfMaFKoCI
00
WHERE IS THE INCREASING ATMOSPHERIC CO2 COMING FROM?
There is implicit assumption among the warmists, including many who call themselves Climate Scientists, that the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are due the accumulation of combustion products due to burning of fossils fuels.
I put this question to Patrick Moore when he was here in Australia recently. He replied that Ice core measurements of trapped atmospheric air bubbles indicate that CO2 levels correlate with tglobal temperatures but with a 600 year lag. Consequently, if the Earth is left to its own devices, increasing temperatures will lead to higher CO2 levels. However these are not normal times. In his view the rising levels of CO2 are due to burning fossil fuels this time.
Other work, based on estimates and calculations ( I regret that I can not immediately quote references ), say that human produced CO2 amounts to about 4% of annual CO2 turnover. Also the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 4 years. It is then shown by the application of Henry’s Law ( gas solubility in liquids), that human produced CO2 cannot contribute more than 2% of the measured increase in CO2.
So a number of questions are suggested:
1. If the increase in CO2 is due to ocean out gassing, why is the level rising when the Earth’s temperature is static?
2. If the CO2 levels lag temperature by 600 years, what was the cold period from which we are supposedly recovering?
3. Can the previous temperature be hind cast from the assumed previous CO2 levels, ie what is the temperature that correlates with an atmospheric CO2 level of 285ppm?
51
There is no doubt that humans are releasing buried carbon into the carbon cycle in the form of CO2 from fossil fuels.
How much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels are we responsible for..?
Who cares, so long as we keep doing it !!
CO2 is the building block of ALL life on this marvellous Earth we inhabit, and she wants/needs more of it. !!
Toward 700+ppm !!! 🙂
181
Equilibrium. Nothing to worry about. The CO2 will disappear into the vast ocean which covers the planet and the equilibrium will be restored. 98% of all gaseous CO2 is in the ocean (50x). Even the IPCC say this.
Where I disagree with the IPCC totally is that you can prove the half life of this process is 14 years, not their 80 years. You can radio carbon date the air itself. However even with their very wrong figure, more than half of the CO2 generated before 1930 has vanished already. With a 14 year half life, there is very little of 20th century CO2 in the air at all.
So the coincidence of increased CO2 and industrialization is just that, not causality. Slightly increased ocean temperature explains everything. Not suprisingly man is not all powerful and does not control atmospheric CO2 levels. You cannot consider the thin atmosphere without the deep oceans which contain vastly more air at pressures up to 340 atmospheres. That is how fish breathe and remember, animals ultimately came from those oceans and cannot move far from either water or salt. Apparently that helps explain Australian beach culture.
The way warmists reason that warmer oceans do not release their CO2 is to argue that CO2 rich deep water take 1,000 years to reach the surface. They imply it is also true of dissolved gas. Clearly it isn’t. Bubbles come from the bottom. Personally I believe there are CO2 elevator mechanisms connecting the deep oceans to the atmosphere with deep absorption in the arctic and deep water outgassing at the tropics. The Bern diagram is wrong.
It is now impossible to understand why people worry about a gas which is a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere and has been proven over 20 years to have no effect on temperature. Without CO2 there is no life on earth. Climates change. So what? I have yet to read a definition of Climate Change beyond natural variability or any mechanism for CO2 driven Climate Change?
101
Courtesy of the United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBIS), which distinguishes the original term from its politicised bastardisation.
Climate Change enjoys the following descriptions including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) definition of the term.
You will see that a distinction is made between climate that is “changed” (anthropogenic) and that which is “variability” (natural). Nevertheless, all definitions include an ‘anthropogenic’ component.
30
Thanks. What a laugh!
The opening line is priceless “Climate change” means a change of climate. Duh! Then it gets sillier “composition of the global atmosphere”. Now why is that a definition of climate? Then has it been worded that way so the increase in CO2 from .03% to .04% qualifies as Climate Change and how can you tell this increase is not natural variability? Clouds of water and humidity have much more impact on climate than CO2, but temperature and humidity and wind speed and direction are not mentioned.
I like the exception in #4, that you include only those changes which are directly connected to human activity (indirectly has me puzzled). Again the question, how can you tell the difference? Droughts and flooding rains are the climate in most of Australia, even if on a long and variable cycle, because heavy rain always follows a drought, by definition. Longer droughts have happened, but when even our Bureau Of Meteorology discards perfectly good records prior to 1909, eliminating the devastating Federal drought, how can we tell what is natural from a mere 100 years of acceptable records prior to homogenization, culling and deletion?
Then you get more self referencing definitions, “measurements of either the mean state or variability of the climate for that place or region”. So climate is measured by measuring the climate. What is a place or region? Is Australia a place? If so how do you average Darwin and Hobart or is that one climate? What is the difference between climate and the weather again?
This definition is so general as to be practically useless, except for the cute idea that the climate is actually the (chemical) composition of the atmosphere. Most people would not think so, but then they are not ‘climate scientists’ like Chief Climate Commissioner Professsor Tim Flannery, an expert in extinct Australian marsupials with a basic degree in English from La Trobe. Or Ross Garnaut or Richard Dennis who debated global meteorology science from their position as economists.
We need a real definition of the climate and a certain way to tell the difference between human induced change and natural variability, between local variations and country wide variations, between winter and summer extremes which can bias. Perhaps the solution is to just homogenize the lot until you get the result you want? Add heat and we could call it a Thermomix. You can cook up anything you want.
30
TdeF, what gave me the proverbial creeps was that the UN has something called the Bibliographic Information System. I don’t really see it as a ‘system’, simply a library, but they do appear to like the complexity and suggested interconnectivity of the word ‘system’, of the multiple functional elements that form a conceptually integrated ‘whole’.
The Ununited Nations (UN) have proved themselves countless times to be superbly inept in their putative primary functions. Now, having turned to social engineering using a discredited theory known as the ‘double dividend’ (improve the environment and make-money), which predictably provides an irresistible lure to a gaggle of low-wattage green politicians and progressive bureaucrats, as they all goose-step forward in their collectivist meme.
30
Actually this formal UN definition of the Climate reminds me of Monty Python and (Miss) Ann Elk’s definition of a dinosaur. Her theory, which is her’s. Thin at one end, thick in the middle and then thin again. To all intents and purposes, absolutely useless no matter how seriously delivered.
20
“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed .. to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere.”
Does anyone actually agree with this? This is not even measured by a Stevenson Screen but chemical composition is the one, the only measure and definition of Climate Change. As Professor Selby opined in his lecture, CO2 and temperature are not just related in the climate models, they are synonymous. So is climate change.
Given Nitrogen is 78%, Oxygen 21%, Argon 1%, the only one which can change substantially as a proportion is tiny CO2 at 0.04%, so Climate is CO2. Of course you have tiny amounts of Hydrocarbons like CH4 and man made Flouro Carbons, but you cannot deny climate change now, as it is defined wholly and solely as CO2 change.
So the common understanding of climate, as measured by wind strength, temperature, humidity, rainfall, vegetation, species, rivers and lakes, clouds and water generally are irrelevant in this new UN definition. Do meteorologists and climatologists and scientists around the world agree with this or is it some UN lawyer’s fantasy?
10
Peter Cook:
ie what is the temperature that correlates with an atmospheric CO2 level of 285ppm?
Well, in the previous warm periods it corresponded to 17, 15.7, 16.5℃ (assuming current ‘world temperature’ is 14℃.
On the other hand at the end of those interglacials, as temperatures dropped but CO2 remained stable, you can choose from 15, 13.2, 13.5. If you include the Holocene, then you can choose from 13 to 16℃. If you go further back into the Pliocene the problem gets harder as there is much more variation.
To sum up, you can have any temperature you want between 1℃ lower or 2℃ higher, unless you want some other temperature. Try some of the warmist sites to see if there having Boxing Day Sales.
120
I think that you might have something there Dud. The secret of life.
30
Peter C. The ocean surface has heated very slightly. That explains everything.
You can check the decrease in solubility of CO2 with even 0.5C of average heating. My simple idea is an elevator mechanism which brings new CO2 from the depths, so that the total outgassing and absorption is increased x 50 beyond what would be predicted by Henry’s Law which is only about the sea/air interface.
In this new model the whole deep ocean is involved in rapid exchange with the biosphere, not the separation of surface ocean and deep ocean which is presumed in the Bern diagram. Henry’s Law is laboratory stuff on a relative micro level like hothouse gas. What happens in a real world with vast and varying pressures, storms, vast exchanges is another matter, but a physical scientist has enough clues from observation. There is certainly no reason to argue that either CO2 increases and temperature increases in the 20th century are largely man made. That was always pure conjecture.
For the IPCC and the Carbon Tax proponents and the Greens, it was pure opportunism.
70
“My simple idea is an elevator mechanism which brings new CO2 from the depths,”
Would that end up lookin a bit like this?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cloud_making_ships.jpg
or
More like these at the bottom here?
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo5xx/geos577/projects/kayzar/html/lake_nyos_disaster.html
More info on underwater CO2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVMcSvG5Mpg
20
Thanks. The deadly CO2 eruptions are very interesting, that CO2 builds up great pressure at depth and can be released in a column, once established. Unlike the open ocean, the problem in the lakes is the lack of currents and disturbance and once CO2 rich water rises, it becomes gaseous and continues rising to explosive levels. CO2 solubility goes up amazingly with pressure and thus depth. The Russians have a similar great fear of this with the H2S in the Black Sea with the boundary of the original sea before the great flood. This anaerobic sub seais full of gas and they fear explosive.
My idea is that while very high pressures can contain vast amounts of gas and pressures in the ocean can reach 600 atmospheres at 6km, it is fundamentally unstable and does not behave as you would expect in a stable system and by Henry’s Law, CO2 should enter the water at the arctic and leave at the equator. There could be any number of steady elevators in both directions and CO2 concentrations should vary greatly across the world’s oceans, confirming the behaviour. The IPCC theory that it should just behave itself and move with the currents is unproven and unjustified, like the whole CO2 greenhouse theory. No laboratory has the pressures of the deep ocean.
50
In geology we have a term called “upwelling” which is responsible for deep ocean nutrients to be pushed up the continental slopes to provide food for shallow biota. This is why we have flourishing communities in the middle of the oceans. The stratification may be present in the Black Sea which is a relatively small self contained system, but not in the vast oceans that are subject to various climatic zones and temperature difference. This causes huge conveyer belts.
The Mother Nature always looks for the lowest entropy and hence catastrophic release of gas is relatively rare. However, I have seen numerous natural seeps that usually are interpreted to be related to hydrocarbons. These can be seen on the sea surface, photographed on the sea floor or observed on seismic both in the water column and under the surface. We can even measure what escapes by capturing bubbles In the water column.
After years of chasing hydrocarbons I have increasingly come to realise that most of the escape features are actually co2. And shock horror I recently involved csiro to capture these bubbles in the sediments deposited just below the sea bed. They have done a good job, but they are geos that still think in a sane way. Most of bubbles, about 95% were composed of co2. We were very lucky to recover hydrocarbons. Most studies so far recovered only co2.
50
It seems that liquid CO2 in the oceans is 5ml per litre, 0.5% and a huge amount of gas. What goes down must go up again. I doubt we understand the mechanisms with a gas which is so easily compressed and even solid at -56C when you have water system which is open at the top with a pressure of 1 atmosphere but 600 atmospheres at the bottom. The physics of this system cannot be reproduced. It is possible we know less about the physics of CO2 in this system and at the bottom of the ocean than we do about conditions on Mars.
As the greatest reservoir of gaseous CO2 on the planet, we might consider the equilibrium with the air more seriously. For example, if all the CO2 left the ocean, the atmosphere would be 2% CO2, which would kill us all, but the plants would love it. They did come first. So a 50% increase in what is a tiny atmospheric CO2 concentration of 0.04% is trivial and unlikely to be caused by humans.
10
TdeF Lets consider a few theoretical what ifs combined with your excellent logic and numbers.
First up what if there is more water down under(like five to eight times the water in the oceans)?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2002/03/0307_0307_waterworld.html
At five times your ” if all the CO2 left….” becomes 12% except the amont of CO2 further down would be greater. Your pressure of “600 atmospheres at the bottom.” would be greater and it would get warmer.
Now what if this pressure is uneven? for example a large volume of material moves. The cause could be anything from an earthquakes, landslides,magnetic dynamo movement, change in LOD, continents moving or even the planet growing etc. In short the earth changes shape. This may leave pockets of very high and very low pressure. Even the odd vacuum.
So what stops the chemical musical chair swap of hydrogen from water and Carbon from CO2 forming assorted length hydrocarbon chains in the random mix?
If these chains are formed would they then float up as CO2 sinks?
Also what stops natural versions of the lake Nyos CO2 de-gas pipe from forming in random places like under that lake itself?
10
“Also what stops natural versions of the lake Nyos CO2 de-gas pipe from forming in random places like under that lake itself?”
Nothing at all. It is likely. One cause might be undersea warm areas and irregularities. The earth is not cold and has hot spots at the bottoms of trenches or thin areas of the mantle or even proto volcanoes and certainly volcanic vents, no matter what the latitude. These can produce the upwellings and they can trigger a CO2 release, especially if warmer than the adjacent ocean. There are also mountains against which currents crash, forcing water upwards, producing the same effect.
10
Dariusz
“After years of chasing hydrocarbons I have increasingly come to realise that most of the escape features are actually co2.”
Below that depth where the CO2 is compressed to liquid would the direction of escape be down? Perhaps to replace hydrocarbon still on its way up.
“Most petroleum-based hydraulic oils compress by approximately ½ of one percent for every 1000 PSI of hydraulic pressure.”
http://www.carldyke.com/compression
00
Here is Becks information from Barrow:
[QUOTE]
Date – – – – CO2 ppm * latitude * * longitude * * *author
1947.7500 – – 407.9 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1947.8334 – – 420.6 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1947.9166 – – 412.1 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.0000 – – 385.7 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.0834 – – 424.4 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.1666 – – 452.3 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.2500 – – 448.3 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.3334 – – 429.3 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.4166 – – 394.3 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.5000 – – 386.7 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.5834 – – 398.3 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.6667 – – 414.5 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
1948.9166 – – 500.0 * *71.00* * * -156.80 * * *Scholander
These data must not be used for commercial purposes or gain in any way, you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: [Ernst-Georg Beck, real history of CO2 gas analysis, http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/data.htm ]
[END QUOTE]
Scholander got more than a 100 ppm swing at Barrow over a year’s time. This type of variation makes more sense to me than the idiotic, CO2 is evenly distributed in the atmosphere manta.
10
“Rare Carbon Dioxide “Lake” Found Under the Ocean”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060830-carbon-lakes.html
00
You may find Prof Murry Salby’s presentation in Hamburg useful.
TdeF’s explanation of `equilibrium’ is right. It takes a long time to reach equilibrium—600 to 800 years to de-gas the oceans, It doesn’t happen overnight, thankfully.
It’s slow because most of the CO2 is carried in the deep thermo-haline currents. The out-gassing takes place where this very cold water surfaces. There aren’t many places for that, so the release is slow.
30
Forgot to mention the most definitive test of this hypothesis. Plant growth is faster in the tropics than it is in the temperate regions. So, if we measure soil carbon at various latitudes we should find it lower in the tropics than in the temperate regions and depending on whether their hypothesis suggests a monotonic decrease in soil carbon or a peak at some condition we should either see than peak as we move from equator to pole or we should see a monotonic increase. So where is the result of that experiment? What, not done? Why not and if the researchers did not think of such a simple test why did the reviewers not point it out? Oh too much trouble, they only like to sit in front of their computers? At what point does laziness or incompetence step over the moral line? Maybe its about time critical paid reviewers (try seconding some of the tax department examiners) review the output from research sponsored by government grants and those findings used to decide the bestowing of future grants. That dread word accountability again.
[Minor editorial changes made] -Fly
30
We could also minimise the effects of the nasty Sun on the earth by changing ships propellers so they only make tiny bubbles (not big ugly ones)????
I think they forgot about the bubbles caused by waves striking the 620,000kms of coastline around the world – d…heads!!!!
These “so-called” scientists are truly certifiable!!!!
Cheers,
60
It doesn’t surprise me these so-called scientists are more expert in the hands on production of salty bubbles……
50
Shucks! Just when you thought all the eggsperts had the problem licked it might cause more rainfall in some areas.
Back to the drawing board perfessers.
50
These sound more like thought bubbles than anything real. Why is it in Climate Science that any crazy unproven even far fetched idea is immediately presented as the absolute scientific truth, if it supports the premise that the world is warming. Too much ice in Antarctica, trade winds caused by Global warming. Freezing weather in the US, disturbance of arctic patterns caused by Global Warming. Bush fires in NSW last year, Global Warming. Of course all hot days and low rainfall areas, Global Warming. Refusal of the planet to heat, natural and unexpected variability overwhelming rapid Global Warming. What ever the question, Global Warming is the answer and CO2 is the culprit. Who needs facts when we already know the answer?
40
Stark raving mad!
40
Haven’t they discovered that deciduous plants release CO2 in autumn? There’s another scary aspect to study, more juicy funding. Or maybe that’s already been done and I missed it.
50
Or that plants emit CO2 at night?
60
Margaret, all plants, as far as I know, release CO2 at night. Dr AD Karve in India has tested this using vertical walls of plastic sheeting dividing fields into cells. At night the CO2 is released and being heavier than air, remains near the ground. The walls prevent breezes carrying it away. The result is increased growth the next day.
20
More models then? Models are a test, if they accurately predict then we have something, if they do not accurately predict then they have shown the hypothesis or hypotheses they were based upon are incorrect.
The way these people are doing science how long before “it ran fine on my play station” will be considered “evidence?”
90
AAAAAHHHHH! Don’t give them any ideas! 🙂
50
Greg Hunt should take notice of this paper as it defeats the purpose of his pet scheme – sequestering carbonaceous metter in the soil!
60
I think we should all thank Jo for bring such merriment and hilarity to the festive season. 🙂
And everyone for playing along. 🙂
50
Indeed.
But it’s a slow news time for the media. Luckily the media was rescued (pardon the pun) in 2013 by Chris Turney and the ‘Ship of Fools’ and that happened bang on Christmas happily filling in many days of zero news.
This year? . . what was The Guardian to do?
You guessed it . . lets recycle 2013 news as Rescued scientists bring back a warning from the Antarctic.
Of course, there’s not a skerrick of news in there, but hey . . .
30
The Conversation has “12 ways to deal with a climate change denier – the BBQ guide“.
Oh what fun!
10
Children are going to grow up and not know what science is …
150
You know, I always just thought that was a prediction.
But now you mention it, I can see that it was a strategic plan, all along.
80
Back in the day I had to have real topics for my theses (yes, theses). Now it seems any old words strung together will do for research topics and subjects. It also used to be GIGO but it is definitely SISO these days. And while this Princeton lot will not have been directly funded by us the grateful Australian taxpayer to tell us that CO2 supports plant life (I wonder what in their parallel universe the plants use to build their cells and other structures?) we do support them indirectly with our gummint funding of the worldwide Green Blob. Pathetic.
20
Fer thems of us wot is a bit fick like, wot is SiSo?
20
S=poo
30
Ah, “excretal evidence”.
That is the second time I have mentioned this on this very thread. I must be getting scatty, in my old age.
20
Perhaps that’s what Tony meant when he said “the science behind global warming is crap”.
00
There are apps available for generating them. Some people just cannot resist those apps. There are apps for generating scientific papers, too. Over 60 of those papers were found and withdrawn recently. ‘Peer review’ missed them. Or maybe the peer review was faked too.
Faking data is old hat. Another few reputations bit the dust this year for that sin.
One could think the science, mathematical and engineering disciplines are the hardest ones to fake. They require maths, but they’re not immune. Medical and social science research seem to feature more often but that is my subjective opinion.
Lewpaper is very real 🙂
20
What happens to the Greens/UN when someone points out that all those Carbon Credit Schemes (by this paper) are *increasing* Carbon Dioxide??
30
The next person who preaches climate nonsense to me will get a flogging.I had a sweater on EFFING Christmas Day unbelievable
30
Plants do sequester carbon – and may be the primary reason for the historical lag between warming and CO2 levels. As the temperature goes up, the plants sequester the CO2, but they do eventually die. Once the plants reach a peak of reproduction, more start dying than are germinating, so carbon starts to leach back into the atmosphere.
SO we only have 800 years to go to reach the next crises in the CAGW religion.
20
Ho hum, so all the pious, lectures we’ve had to endure about the virtues of “carbon farming” and its magical ability to rid us of that evil trace gas – now out the window I presume?
20
Glen Michel @ # 27.1.1
ROM “the succinct” he shall be known as!
__________________
An unwarranted description which I intend to correct right now [ 🙂 ]
Jo’s headline article above is a classic example of why Post Modern Science is broken.
The retraction war
Scientists seek demigod status, journals want blockbuster results, and retractions are on the rise: is science broken?
___________
What if our governments agreed to pay out some hundreds of millions of the public’s tax dollars to a few dodgy companies that nobody has ever heard of prior to building say a road the where the contracts merely stated they wanted the money so they could perhaps build a road which they weren’t sure they could build in any case and weren’t sure after they started building that road where it would finish up or if it would ever be finished,
Furthermore there was never going to be ANY auditing or ANY accountability on where and how that already handed over government money was going to be spent or was spent and any auditing on the road building quality or road construction quality or even f the money was actually spent on the road.
There would be hell to pay in the media and in political and public circles for a very considerable time and a few politicians would likely be seriously looking at having to find new employment after the next election round.
Yet this is precisely the situation in science today.
One thing is absolutely certain
The current methods of funding science and the total lack of accountability and total lack of quality control, the total lack of any quality auditing process across the whole spectrum of science cannot and will not continue for very much further into the foreseeable future.
Rapidly increasing public disillusionment with science as it is being promoted and produced today will see to that
The chutzpah of the science industry that imagines itself to be supposedly cocooned in what is now becoming an increasingly imaginary high public status will be utterly shocked when public support and the consequent public opinion shift finally leads to a massive reassessment of both the quality or more accurately the declining quality in the bulk of science delivered compared to the immense funding available to science exacerbated by the vast over manning of much of science by at best, very mediocre and often downright incompetent and carpet bagging so called scientists.
So as I have suggested both here on Jo’s blog previously and on Climate Etc [ where it actually got a quite mild and even an approving reaction in some cases ] but just change the way in which science is funded to the similar form of funding that EVERY other sector of our capitalistic based society has to conform to.
In short privatise and commercialize the funding of science in the same way as in any other private project from an individual or company.
The scientists finds his / her own funding and is then recompensed from the public purse AFTER a full assessment is made of the outcomes of the scientists research project and it’s usability and / or advancement in knowledge.
Like any industry there would soon be specialist funding organisations set up by financiers and entrepreneurial organisations who would do the assessments on the basis of the scientists personal abilities and the chances of scientific advancement and therefore a very good chance of a quite munificent recompensing from the public purse to the scientists who received private backing for their project.
The there would likely be a reduction in the tax payers funds towards science of maybe 50% and a reduction scientists numbers as the incompetent and and caret baggers were weeded out of maybe 80% .
And we, the public would likely to get a whole lot better and more relevant science for our money to our great advantage.
And that was really the way in which some of the greatest leaps in science have been done in the past, with a minimum of funding and using brains and analysis of observed facts instead of replacing brain power with a “Borg” created version of science that increasingly relies on no more than some unverified , unvalidated unproven models of very doubtful origins and provenance developed by biased science developers with a very limited knowledge of the pitfalls of model development
Read what other proffessional modellers in other industries have to say about models developed by so called scientists in Steve McIntyres “Climate Audit” blog post; “Unprecedented” Model Discrepency
Where under the current science institutional structure and science funding regimes are the Einstein’s, the Fermis’s, Von Neumanns, Oppenhiemers and Sakharov’s of nuclear research, even the Von Brauns of the Saturn moon rocket development, the Sigmund Freud’s of psychoanalysis, Linus Pauling the great american chemist, the list is long and it all stops in the 1950’s with Watson’s and Cricks identification of the double helix in DNA.
Note I said “identification” as DNA had been identified way back in the 1860’s by a Swiss Chemist, Friedrich Miescher.
There have been no world renown, science ground breaking developments and scientific breakthroughs nor world renown and recognised outstanding scientist who have made those a few times in a century scientific breakthroughs that alter our entire thinking in large parts of science and society.
None have appeared in the last three quarters of a century since WW2 to match those immense science and societal changing advancements that the great scientists of the 19th and first half of the 20th century gave to the world and did so on a pittance compared to the lavish funding of much of today’s elitist scientific institutes, lavish funding which increasingly seems to have led to an comparable inverse declining trend of scientific advancement achieved.
Post modern Science is broken, badly broken and Jo’s post above is just one tiny example of just how utterly broken, incompetent and out of touch with reality and scientifically corrupted most of modern so called science, particularly anything to do with climate science has become.
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Ahhh There’s ROM !! 🙂
60
Darn!
My mask must have slipped.
60
ROM
Whilst I agree, there are some notable post 50-ties exceptions:
1. Penzias and Wilson discovery (accidental though) of the cosmic background radiation
2. Formulation of the plate tectonics theory (although build on the continental drift)
3. Low energy particle fusion (cold fusion) that was hounded by the precursors of today,s climafascist
4. Dark flow discovery – the 10% of our universe is moving in one direction almost certainly indicating gravitational connection with another universe.
I have left the boson Higgs discovery out of this list as this adds to confusion rather eureka moment. In fact physics now is in complete shambles after claiming that we are on the verge theory of everything ie “the physics is settled now and can I have my Nobel price now” race.
The uncertainty In science should be celebrated not feared, as there is so much to discover.
But somehow that exploration feeling has never existed amongst climatologists that work on the most chaotic of systems, the weather.
30
Plate Tectonics did not build on Wegener’s Continental Drift hypothesis. PT was discovered as a serendipitous result of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Treaty monitoring provided the impetus, the investment and the equipment. Networks of seismometers were installed to monitor adherence to the treaty. Because of the wide dispersal of these instruments, a nuclear explosion, earthquake or volcanic eruption both aerial and submarine, point of origin could be accurately pin pointed.
These instruments showed that earthquakes, volcanoes, and other active geological features were mostly aligned along distinct belts around the world. Plate tectonics was born and those belts defined the edges of tectonic plates.
The Earth’s magnetic field is known to change direction regularly. Basalt, a common lava, preserves the magnetic field present when it sets. Stripes of opposing magnetic polarity were discovered on the ocean floors each side of the ocean floor divergent ridges. This meant the ocean floor was moving.
This and other evidence (you can look it up) disproved Wegener’s hypothesis of Continental Drift in detail but not necessarily concept. It wasn’t the continents which were moving but the underlying plates they sat on. He had not been able to come up with a mechanism, and so his ideas were not popular with his peers.
20
“What if our governments agreed to pay out some hundreds of millions of the public’s tax dollars to a few dodgy companies that nobody has ever heard”
Worked fine for School buildings, desal plants, freeways, bridges, railways, wind farms, solar farms, wave power, water buybacks, refugee camps, centrelink services, etc, etc,
Just off the top of my head. They mount up, don’t they?
Whats your point?
10
Every single example of government FU’s you give there have a purely localised effect and impact which is compensated for elsewhere by the benefits and advances that arise in building and developing other highly beneficial developments that are created by citizens trying to make a buck by providing something other citizens are prepared to pay for. ie; Capitalism
Climate science in particular imagines and acts as if it’s research outcomes and it’s advocated solutions applies to the whole planet and furthermore, there is no compensating mechanism apparent anywhere to counter the effects of the very harmful to both advanced economies as well as the least developed nations of the advocated policies of climate science and the seriously bad climate related science we see such as in Jo’s post above.
And why, under your scenario if Science can continue to be funded without any auditing, accountability or responsibility for how the money funded to it is used, then we might as well cancel the private sector along with Capitalism and we can all sit back and enjoy the governmental largesse that will be coming our way under similar provisions that most of science enjoys today.
I seem to remember the Russians and most of eastern Europe under Russian duress as well as Mao’s China tried that system a few decades ago.
It was called Communism
40
So the screeds of ROMulan return. It’s not as interminably boring as a Pointman monologue, but still pretty bad. If you’re so fond of quoting Aeon articles, here’s another which is highly relevant:
As for your ingenious plan to privatise science, you would kill scientific progress. Often a breakthrough that generates return on investment is built upon a half dozen other findings which each had no market value on their own. If you won’t fund anything that doesn’t result in a return then you make the occasional revolutionary stuff nearly impossible.
Perhaps you dream that private money will fund stuff that doesn’t have market value?
Let me guess; When the bank or the VCs go to the government, ho-hum research paper in hand, to get back the money they invested in the authors, they will be claiming interest on top of their principal investment to create the return that the commercially valueless research can’t generate by itself. They will be paid profits for having added no value to the process. It’s yet another method of socialising the losses and privatising the profits. You’ve created the Science equivalent of the TARP bailouts and Obamacare.
I mean, we expect government to be a hive of inefficiency and waste. Therefore it’s the natural home of scientific research, with its numerous dead ends and quirky personnel.
But we haven’t even gotten to the traditional Baby Boomer Golden Era Rant:
So now that all the easy stuff has already been discovered and teams of people are tackling problems too difficult for even a talented individual to solve, you’re actually going to deny that any major progress is being made in any area?? That’s taking science denial to a whole new level. Why don’t you google “scientific breakthroughs of 2014” and see what you get?
EXAMPLES FROM JUST THIS YEAR:
—
Young Blood Fixes Old: Researchers demonstrated that blood from a young mouse — or even just a factor known as GDF11 from young mouse blood — can rejuvenate the muscles and brains of older mice. The findings have led to a clinical trial in which Alzheimer’s patients are receiving plasma from young donors.
Neuromorphic Chips: Mimicking the architecture of a human brain, computer engineers at IBM and elsewhere rolled out the first large-scale “neuromorphic” chips this year, which are designed to process information in ways that are more akin to living brains.
Expanding the Genetic Alphabet: Researchers have engineered E. coli that harbors two additional nucleotides — X and Y — in addition to the normal G, T, C, and A that make up the standard building blocks of DNA. Such synthetic bacteria can’t reproduce outside the laboratory, but they may be used to create designer proteins with “unnatural” amino acids.
Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project: Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.
Scientists Identify Gene Editing Enzyme: …This new genetic tool – known as CRISPR for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats — is more powerful, “because now you can essentially change a genome at will to almost anything you want. The sky’s the limit.”
16-Year-Old Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair 2014 With World-Changing Crop Yield Breakthrough : In all test groups seeds treated with r.japonicum and r.leguminosarum germinated faster by approx 50% (p<0.001). Both bacterial strands increased crop yield by an average of 30% with some results exceeding 70% (p<0.001).
New Subatomic Particle Discovered: A newly discovered subatomic particle will provide opportunities to learn about how the most powerful of nature’s forces operates. It takes a big team to investigate the very small. In the case of the new meson Ds3*(2860),- that meant 800 authors on the papers
—
Perhaps 7 breakthroughs this year alone aren’t major enough, you’ll have to research the previous 68 years yourself. You presume you’ll find nothing.
Ah that’s 1098 words now, exceeding your 990 words above, but discounting quotes only 364 of these words are actually mine. I’d have to personally type another 626 to match “The Artist Formerly Known As Succinct”, but that would be a pointless “game” of “hyper-verbal loneliness”.
31
Seems like I have touched a couple of sensitive nerve ends in my comments.
The reaction is not that dissimilar although a lot milder than the climate alarmist reactions to ;
How dare you question catastrophic global warming”
versus
How dare you question the way in which science is funded today?
How dare you question the man made causes of global warming?
Versus
How dare you question the way in which science is being conducted today.?
How dare you question those climate model predictions”
Versus
How dare you question the lack of any really significant and absolutely basic scientific advancements over the last three quarters of a century that would have shifted and changed our world view about everything we thought we already knew with great certitude.
All of the advancements listed in the posts from hdl and Andrew Mcrae, good and all as they are, when measured against the truly great advances in scientific understanding were all just incremental advancements in human knowledge.
The one truly major scientific advancement for our time and era and for our race and species will be the controlled harnessing of Fusion power which we might be very close to achieving I sincerely hope.
It is no longer a case of not “IF” we can harness Fusion power now but a case of “WHEN” we might be able to harness Fusion power.
That advancement in human ingenuity in the harnessing of the Fusion power of the atom for our species use into the entire future of our species and perhaps even beyond for another future species, will rank along with the use of fire which is the CONTROLLED use of ENERGY which defines our Homo species and marks us out in an unchallengeable way as being completely distinct and different to every other species on this planet
The ability to harness, control and use Fusion energy will rank alongside of the controlled use of fire, the development of complex languages, of the invention of the wheel, the development of agriculture, the development of writing, the invention of printing and the development of electricity which is an absolute fundamental for the continued existence of our modern civilisation.
And possibly still to come which will change mankind’s entire outlooks on a scale that mankind has rarely seen and experienced in the past might be the discovery of sentient and maybe even intelligent species somewhere else in the Cosmos.
begin to contemplate.
Perhaps of more interest is that most of the recent questioning of the way in which much of science is now being conducted and funded today is now coming from within the science industry itself as it sinks in that some parts of science are beyond being just plain sick to a point where if allowed to continue, it will bring much of the remaining good science being conducted in other disciplines down with it.
.
As for the length of my posts;
Fortunately there is no compulsion on anybody to read my posts and I swould be very surprised if more than a few percent of the readers of Jo’s commentary bothered to plow through my posts.
To those readers who do bother to plow through my posts, Thankyou!
I have been subjected to word counts a number of times both here and elsewhere due to the length of my posts but I wonder if the combined posts of other denizens far more erudite and informed than I am were all added up in the same JoNova post whether I wouldn’t be down the list on word counts by some margin.
I write as much as anything to clarify my own thinking on a subject or concept as I have found this actual writing down of points for and against a point of view, a subject or a concept really clarifies the thinking and in my opinion, allows a far more nuanced and rational view to be taken of the subject in question.
So if a few sensitive scientific nerve ends got a bit touched up by my comments maybe the owners of those scientific nerve endings should look in a mirror and ask themselves; Is what we have and do the best way of doing it or maybe are there better ways and improvements that we should get out of our very comfortable rut and have a damn good look at for ourselves and at science in general instead of allowing ourselves to be goaded by an old farmer into verbally retreating back into our deep and comfortable rut of the past.
30
Well I was hoping to make it through one more festive season but there is still a few days to go before new year so I suspect that it is all over.
Nearly made it but it is almost certain that CO2 induced plant growth induced CO2 rise will end the planet and possibly most of the solar system…
30
End of Most of the Solar System?
Can’t and won’t happen.
Most of the Solar System hasn’t been settled by that ungreen CO2 emitting scourge of climate, mankind.
20
So you are telling me that CO2 does not cause supernovae or rapacious worm holes??
Wow.
Amazed that there is anything not caused by CO2.
20
It hasn’t been implicated in worm holes. Supernovae could manufacture gigatonnes of the stuff; they make enormous quantities of everything in the periodic table. How much of that gets to react with others in the cauldron is unknown. But correlation does not mean causation. So no, not supernovae.
NASA has reported warming of the outer planets. I’m still waiting to find out if it’s allegedly caused by Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions. But all is still quiet on that front. I think it’s because they haven’t been able to get mankind out there yet.
30
As Richard Feynman once said
This paper is a classic vague theory. If carbon fails to be released, there is an immediate cop out. But in the unlikely event of a massive increase in warming due to a huge increase in a step increase in CO2 levels it “proof” the theory is correct. It is like being able to place 100-1 bets at no cost, but be able to collect the winnings. One successful prediction and you are famous. Each failure just shows the need for extra research money. A ponzi scheme will eventually collapse, but this can go on and on.
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There are sooo many CO2 articles and papers. I came across this one earlier today, and just as always is also based on modeling.
“Maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission” by Katharine L Ricke and Ken Caldeira.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/12/124002/article
20
I heard this notion expressed elsewhere the other day…. an alarmist on a blog somewhere I think.
This is just silly. If a CO2 molecule is going to do anything in the atmosphere it is not going to wait ten years. It’s effect will be immediate. It takes less than ten years for that molecule to leave the atmosphere.
10
stuff and nonsense, and here’s some more:
no comments for either of the following CarbonBrief articles – nothing unusual in that:
26 Dec: CarbonBrief: Roz Pidcock: Five bits of research that shaped climate science in 2014
Climate science never stops developing. Over the course of the year we’ve covered a myriad of scientific studies, some of which have made the news, and others which have been more quietly received. Here’s our pick of the papers that have shaped scientific discussion about climate change in 2014…
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/12/five-pieces-of-research-that-shaped-climate-science-in-2014/
25 Dec: CarbonBrief: Simon Evans: 25 inspirational texts about climate change
Did Santa bring any of these this Christmas?
We asked 25 thinkers, writers and journalists a simple question: What books or readings inspired you to get involved in climate change-related work?
We were expecting to get back a list of books – and we did. But we also got some interesting insights into why people work on this issue, why they started, and why they carry on
(first up) Mike Mann…
(also includes)
Mike Hulme
Katharine Hayhoe
Jonathon Porritt
Phil Jones
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/12/25-inspirational-texts-about-climate-change-christmas-2014/
(from About CarbonBrief)
Christian Hunt is our Director and Editor. He previously worked as a digital editor for Greenpeace and as a researcher for the Public Interest Research Centre. He holds an MA in Conflict Resolution from Bradford University, and a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of York.
Funding
We are grateful for the support of the European Climate Foundation, which provides our funding…
Comments policy
Stay on-topic…No ad hominem attacks…
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And here was me thinking involvement in climate change related work was all about having a bent for science and the scientific method.
50
Thats not necessary.
In NZ, a newly minted millionaire and economist spent $500,000 of his own money to hear `both sides’ of the climate debate so he could decide what it was about. He finally chose the CAGW side and promptly wrote and published a book on it. The now thoroughly debunked Hockeystick graph was a centre piece in said book.
A mayor of one if the NZ north island cities, whose previous occupation was Public Relations, also planned to write and publish a book on climate. Fortunately for us all, he never quite got there.
The creator of the famous graph also said “I’m not a statistician” in answer to the debunker’s exposure of his faulty statistics — the invention of an algorithm which preferentially selects hockeysticks from even pink noise.
So who needs qualifications to be a Klimate Scientist? (Also See SkepticalScience.com. No qualifications nor Science there either.)
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I was particularly interested in the quotation from Phil Jones:
“We have prospective MSc students wanting to read something before they come. I always recommend the Rough Guide to Climate Change – which seems now in its third edition. Not really inspirational, but gets across simply many of the points we want to instill into a new set of students.”
This, in my opinion, could have come straight out of a text on “conditioning” aka “brain-washing”. Students are not though to think independently, or steered into reaching and defending their own conclusions, but rather to blindly accept, “the points we want to instill.” Whatever happened to the Socratic method of teaching? What ever happened to “truth”?
60
Ha ha. So desperate. An attempt to downplay the main benefit of increased atmospheric CO2. More life leads to more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to, “Ahhhhhhhhhh! OMG!!!! We’re all going to die!!!”
Stop planting trees, schoolchildren. You’re only killing the next generation.
110
Exactly
Couldn’t we just clear and concrete everything that hold CO2 in the ground
Maybe use Oil based paint to seal the top as well
Green would be nice
We’ve started already
20
May be slightly of topic?
Correct me if I am wrong but I am unaware of any research into the earth atmosphere being lost as a result of our planet moving through space. Astronomers talk about detecting signs of life on the extra-solar planets by looking at their atmospheric drag through space. In other words earth,s atmosphere cannot be regarded as a closed system with co2, oxygen and nitrogen continuously lost through that process. Look at Mars, atmosphere that was eventually lost as indicated by the presence of free surface flowing water in the past.
Replenishment of co2 is vital for our survival and one would say that Gaia evolved us not just for plastic then.
22
Well, I know that George Carlin suggested it was plastic and you are thinking maybe CO2. You both are partly correct.
My theory is that Gaia needed a non-explosive way to remove the solid, liquid, and gaseous excretal (cue Rereke) material she had produced that was locked under the surface. This material, being both flammable and explosive, could have blown Earth to bits if it all went off at once. Humans found ways to bring it slowly to the surface and safely convert most of it to a non-explosive and otherwise useful product. For a large monetary advance I can have a book ready with specifics in 6 months.
40
No, John, I refuse to bite.
It is a bit of an “in-joke”, anyway.
20
Not exactly form moving through space more like being vaporized by the sun.(cue Star Wars music)
Low-Energy Ion Escape from the Terrestrial Polar Regions
00
I think everyone’s reply’s are going good today so far but haven’t we all missed the point that if trees and plants are coursing the release of all that stored up Soil Carbon according to this “new” “computer model” and these people thing that’s a bad bad thing. Doesn’t that suggest that they are doing the wrong thing by trying to save the forest’s and stopping people from cutting down trees? Shouldn’t we be starting up our chainsaws and start cut cut cutting down those forest. There’s a computer model that says we have to do that to save the plant now isn’t there? Timber industry in Tasmania needs to hear about this so called “New” “Computer model” after all the Greens believe in “computer models” now don’t they? And they could do with the Jobs do there.
70
Thing is,
If the trees are releasing all this CO2…
…that means that our anthropogenic contribution must be even smaller than 3% ! 🙂
71
Good point Griss. All the more reason for the Greens and environmentalist to cut down those 97% polluting trees and save the world ha. The computer model say so. They have to did for Gia, the model says so
20
The UK has learnt all about the accuracy of CO2 = Warming computer models.
The whole Extended Greenhouse Effect hypothesis is built on and supported purely by models, to which the UK’s Met Office is a devoted and devout subscriber. Whenever anyone actually makes observations, they soon learn they don’t match the models.
In September 2008,the UK Met Office predicted ‘This winter will be milder than average and drier than last year in the UK’ based on their CO2-makes-warming model. That was the winter of the famous NASA satellite photo – of an all-white Great Britain.
After that beating, in April 2009 the Met Office forecast `a Barbeque Summer.’ People who would have holidayed overseas stayed home on that promise. July was soggy with extensive flooding and August not any better. That cost the tourism industry a lot.
So in October 2009 the MO repeated it’s `dry and warm’ forecast. Yup. That winter saw the deepest snow drop for years across the whole country. White out and freezing with temps down to -15 degrees. Councils ran out of grit for de-icing roads before the middle of winter. Heathrow airport didn’t have enough equipment to de-ice the runways. That was an expensive forecast. It was computer generated from their CO2 model.
For the 2011 winter, the MO refused to issue a seasonal forecast, just monthly updates posted on its web site. Somewhere. It was a cold and very snowy winter.
Piers Corbyn of Weather Action a private long range weather forecaster with a better record than the UK Met Office, made money by betting against the UK Met Office’s long range predictions. I have no idea how much he made, nor do I know if the bookmakers have stopped accepting his bets. He claims 80 – 85% accuracy in his forecasts.
The true climate deniers are those who support the CO2 Green house effect in the face of continuous evidence of its failure such as the UK Met Office’s failures. They claim failure to act is going to be fatal. Unfortunately those recent northern hemisphere winters have been very expensive since everyone except Corbyn’s clients, acted in accord with CO2 warming and it was badly wrong. It was fatal to thousands of British citizens. Many Pensioners, perhaps 10,000 or more, couldn’t afford the expensive ‘alternative energy’ from the windfarms and froze.
Before rushing to obey the conclusions of the latest model, think carefully. It’s a CO2 model. The UK Met Office is still wrong. It’s asked for another UKP87,000,000 super computer for its weather modelling. About all that can guarantee, is they will be wrong faster.
So what about the conclusions of this new model? I don’t know about you, but I’m really comfortable with breathing oxygen.
What will happen if we cut down all the trees?
40
Bloody marvelous reply Sophocles thank you very much for it. I hope you and the Griss had a safe and Merry Christmas. I to like breathing the Pollutant Oxygen after all that what it is. If my history and all that iron ore are right. But thank you for going into such detail about people blindly following Computer model and the damage that that has coursed. I was just trying to point out if the Greens and environmentalist blindly following Climate Scientist computer models well now the models say they are doing the wrong thing for all these years. Well I had a try what can I say hey.
To Jo and everyone that helps her out and all my fellow visitors to Jo’s site please have and safe and happy new year. May the truth about all this Climate change crap come out by this time next I hope. Bye
20
Rereke Whakaaro –
was hoping someone would notice the Phil Jones quote.
Jones’ previous line is also incredible:
“When I started it was climate research. There wasn’t climate change then!”
amusingly, the whole piece is recycled from September, when it was directly targetting students!
CarbonBrief: 25 inspirational texts about climate change
15 Sep 2014, 16:15
Simon Evans
Around this time each September, thousands of students will go off to study climate change at university. But sometimes climate and environmental issues can be pretty dry.
So we asked 25 thinkers, writers and journalists a simple question: What books or readings inspired you to get involved in climate change-related work?..
COMMENT by Bob Henson:
Excellent compilation–my list of “need to read this” books has just expanded. Many thanks to Phil Jones for the kind words about my “Rough Guide to Climate Change”! The latest (fourth) edition has just been released under a new name and publisher: “The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change,” by AMS Books (American Meteorological Society)…
SIMON EVANS: Thanks Bob. In fact your book was recommended twice!
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/09/25-inspirational-texts-about-climate-change/
u have to laugh! btw i can’t see where it was recommended a second time, but maybe i missed it.
20
Check under comedy or science fiction.
20
That interesting category of Science Fantasy, perhaps?
00
btw SBS Two has the dud “years of living dangerously” series showing right now, having shown it on SBS one already. plus it was available on the basic cable package before SBS had it.
talk about flogging a dead horse.
40
Jo must be in the pay of Big Soil.
80
and predictions of peak soil from the pants soilers are to be followed by the soil glut.
30
Soil-ant green?
50
I think support for the thaeory will soon ‘peater’ out.
10
… Or sent to the compost heap.
10
That was a terrible pun and I have tipped in ten bucks as a self-imposed fine.
50
That was great, thanks.
20
History is riddled with rapid large scale change. Here is one that does not seem to have been shown to have a huge effect on CO2.
The Australian prickly pear experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTBjj4pBaO4
20
Here they are deliberately planting it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27dBvxZQ2zk
20
If you are ever at a vineyard when the vines are growing rapidly – make a mark on a new shoot about 25 cm back from the growing tip. Do this at sunrise and then check the length at Noon and at sunset. The growth in just length is stunning. Leaf area would likewise be stunning but I’ve never tried to do area or weight. Can I get a grant?
30
I’ll wait for the BBC to report this ground-breaking might-be could-be settled science before I’ll believe it is not the 1st of April.
30
Here is the BBC showing how cactus disolve rock.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8209000/8209687.stm
20
It is always 1st of April at the BBC. Nobody who now works there, knows how to wind up the calendar.
40
This is clearly not BBC, Not April and shows cacti disolving rocks.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0098847209000835
10
Haven’t they developed a computer model for it yet?
00
Had to get up at 4 this morning to dig my car out of the snow in order to get to work on time .I put the BBC 24hr news on to check the weather forcast only to have to endure a mini climate documentary from Roger Harrabin,not only are the oceans acidifying its all the fault of you Australians, your coal your people and your government.Sorry i cant post a link i’m at work now,but arent the Beep trying to make in roads in the australian media at the moment ? you really need to fight them on the beaches and on the coral reefs ” literally “
80
We have our hands full with Aunty … also adept at propaganda. At least the Mail is reliable.
‘Snow, sleet and blizzards have hit parts of the UK which could see areas of Britain wake up to a blanket of snow on Saturday morning.
‘An ‘area of rain, sleet and snow’ is moving east across Northern Ireland, Wales, central and northern England and Scotland, forecasters said.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2887496/Icy-blast-set-bring-4-inches-snow-parts-Britain-today-cold-snap-set-New-Year.html#ixzz3N5L9JBwC
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I think this story pretty much sums up climate alarmism.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/08/sex-and-climate-change.html
Its just stupidity wrapped in idiocy with a dash of the moronic for good measure. Im surprised any adult is taken in by any of it frankly…. but then again people rarely fail to disappoint.
10
More intellectual pocket marbles. A `chain reaction’ indeed.
How come there are no signs. symptoms nor evidence of any sort that this sort of thing has happened in the past?
Could it be that it hasn’t happened?
Did they do a decent literature search? (There are plenty of papers at CO2 Science about both plant and soil responses to rises in CO2. Did they even notice?)
Present CO2 levels are too low to support the giant herbivores (the titanosaurs of 65 + million years ago) and their predators (T-Rex and his buddies). They left enough fossil skeletons around to prove CO2 is the gas of life.
There isn’t enough fossil fuel available to add enough CO2 to the atmosphere to get anywhere near the levels of those years.
and even if there were, the temperatures aren’t high enough to support it in the atmosphere because CO2 is not a warming causitive agent. The oceans would absorb it and precipitate it as limestone. (Calcium Carbonate. The oceanic pH protector.) If CO2 was a causative agent, then the dinosaurs wouldn’t have had to develop feathers to keep them warm during those pesky Ice Ages they lived through, even with those elevated CO2 levels.
The largest land herbivores which can be supported at current levels of CO2 are the relatively tiny elephants.
Given the 4.5 GY this planet has existed, and the 540+ MY of the Phanerozoic, which has had atmospheric CO2 levels of 2000 ppm without any run-away chain reactions, it is highly unlikely that the mere 400ppm of the present is ever going to create such an effect. If it hasn’t happened in 540 + MY, why should it happen in just a few years at historically starvation levels?
Given also, the success of the flora and fauna back then, it also strongly suggests that in the event of such a `catastrophe’ ever occuring, it could only be a good thing.
Someone should tell those boys that what they’re doing is addictive and eventually makes their eyes go funny.
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I (think I) have some (self perceived) expertise in the electrical generation area, and when it comes to the Science, I religiously try to not expose myself to ridicule as being an absolute novice, so on these science based Posts, I try and just keep to myself, and actually attempt to learn ….. stuff.
However, having been at this business for almost seven years now, I have followed so many links to information that I (think I may) have actually learned some things, and again, this novice level learning is not even enough to make me the lowest level novice there is.
However, one thing I have learned is that, true, plants do suck up CO2 from the air. But, but but, (and isn’t there always a but) this only happens during daylight hours. with the Sun being the actual trigger here.
As soon as the light from the Sun hits any green growing plant, THAT is the trigger. The process of sucking the CO2 out of the air around it then begins. That green growing plant, any plant growing in the ground then ‘switches on‘ for want of a better explanation, and starts to suck the CO2 out of the Atmosphere around it. It then sequesters that CO2 down into its below ground area, eg, the root system.
Plants (evidently) operate in a much similar fashion as humans do. So, we, as humans breathe in, taking in air with its Oxygen component, and transferring it via the lungs to the blood system, where it goes around the body and is used, all the while sucking up the excess ‘bad things‘ back into the blood stream, eg, excess Carbon in the body, like from the food we have eaten etc, say, any vegetable we may have partaken of, transferring the carbon from that vegetable into our bloodstream, and any excess Carbon then gets carried via the bloodstream back to the heart, and then to the lungs and joining with excess Oxygen to be breathed out as Carbon Dioxide.
Similarly, while the green living plant in the ground takes in the CO2, it then sequesters the Carbon part of that, and gives off the Oxygen back into the air.
However, the TRIGGER for all this is the SUN, switching it on first thing in the morning, and then, as soon as the light stops, it ‘switches back off’.
So, the more green things growing in the ground, the more CO2 being sucked out of the air.
Say, it’s almost a self generating cycle.
More CO2 ….. more plants. More plants ….. more CO2 being sucked out of the air.
To my mind, i that sounds like a win/win situation.
But hey, what would I know? Science is most definitely not my (perceived) area of knowledge.
Tony.
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Tony, plants don’t actually sequester carbon, they just use it to grow.
They sort of store it for a little while.
When they die that carbon all becomes part of the carbon cycle again.
Its all a matter of the time period. Plants are but a pinprick in time, even the oldest ones.
Once they get buried deep and in bulk they are taken out of the carbon cycle, (which is NOT good)
Lucky we have come along just in time to release some of that accidentally sequestered carbon and give plant life a much needed boost.
We cannot do much about the stuff that ends up as carbonates on the bottom of the oceans though. That takes much, much longer to ever be seen again.
By releasing carbon in the form of fossil fuels, all we are doing is expanding the carbon cycle by a small amount.
This is GOOD for all life on Earth !!!
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This is a good example of the CAGWers selective thought processes in which they ignore the facts and create new “realities” from their ill informed models. The carbon cycle in soils has been studied in detail for at least the past 50 years – I did research in this area in Africa in the 1960’s and even then there was a large body of information, not least from the Rothamsted Research Station in the UK that dates from 1843. Persons interested in the facts should visit CO2Science.com that is run by the Idso brothers who are real experts in this area based on research involving measurements not fantasy models.
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Pardon my ,”Ho hum,” about all this but I remember dire warnings about the particle accelerator buried under Cern, Switzerland. “Oh, help, help, help. It could set off a chain reaction that could destroy the world. Better not build it much less ever use it. Sob, sob, sob,” cried the experts.
Funny though — they’ve now run the thing and whaddaya know? The world is still here.
And before that if I remember correctly, it was atomic bombs that might set off a chain reaction and destroy the world.
Then there was Godzilla, and the Earth stood still. Be afraid you puny humans, be very afraid. Disaster is stalking you at every bend in the road.
Giant asteroids scare me more than CO2 in the soil. Earthquakes scare me more than CO2 in the soil. And neither of those things scares me one bit. So bring on your scare story. I need a good laugh.
The world has proven to be so much more durable than the fear of it’s imminent demise — a fact I find most peculiar. Why does the world refuse to follow orders? Does it need a spanking to get it to behave?
How did life ever endure long enough to get to where we could be afraid of our own shadow? I don’t get it. But I guess we need to face the fact that life is a fatal disease and then get on down the road instead of being stuck in this twilight zone of fear that our scientists want us to stay in. 🙁
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It’s been part of the human condition since we first invented language. Everything which happened was ascribed to an aspect of The Gods, which initially lived behind every tree and in every pool (except the crocodile infested ones—they were devils) and were eventually whittled down, merged and reduced to one all-seeing all-powerful escape-proof God.
Medicine man
Shaman
High Priest
Sorcerer
Witch Doctor
If you don’t want to work for a living, what other occupation is there?
Ah! I know another one:
Klimate Scientist.
Oh yes, for all our knowledge, for all our science, for all our education we’re still a timorous and superstitious little ape.
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To confirm this diabolical-plant-hypothesis we would have to have evidence of runaway warming in previous epochs when CO2 was much higher than at present.
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But this time its different, the plants are changed, they were educated at Harvard.
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If all you need is a few “coulds” and a couple of “mights” to get a science grant, count me in.
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This is a classic example of one of the major weaknesses of computer modelling of complex processes : as the model iterates, errors grow exponentially. Such models have a tendency to either converge or diverge. This particular example is a divergence, where CO2 production gets a spurious positive feedback leading to a runaway situation (purely model-generated of course).
With a tiny bit of tweaking, a climate modeller can generate any tiipping point you want.
40
I sense that the story is shifting 360 degrees.
Ever so slowly the narative is shifting and the enemy carbon will slowly become their friend and Jo and Whats up will become the enemy for being in the way of progress.
The doomers will string this out till they run out of our money and then this is going to be all our fault.
I can still hear the Chiness deligate at Copenhagen telling everyone that “We haven’t forgotten the Opium wars yet” We are going to have to have a long memory also.
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Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
20
Heed the wisdom of the WOPR: “The only way to win is not to play”.
Such is the game of life. We have to reduce our numbers and the priority should be malcontent climate alarmists first. That should reduce the problem by about 97%.
/jest mode off
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