Recent Posts
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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one
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Thursday
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Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.
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Wednesday
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Easter Sunday
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Saturday
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Good Friday
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In crash-test dummy land, we solve teenage girl climate anxiety with $500b in fantasy weather experiments…
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Thursday
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Nothing says “Safe and Effective” like destroying all the data from Australia’s giant abandoned vaccine study
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Wednesday
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Who owns the oceans? The UN wants to tax ships to reduce carbon emissions — a $40b windfall for unaccountable global bureaucrats
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Conservatives promise to axe the car tax that would have added $10k to petrol and diesel cars
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Friday
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The monster Green Tariffs we put on ourselves are worse than a foreign trade war
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Thursday
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Trump goes gangbusters on coal power and coal mining to supply AI energy demand
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Wednesday
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Instead of $8b in rebates, Labor could have built gas and coal plants and actually made cheap electricity
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Tuesday
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Labor wants the working class to help rich people buy batteries
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Monday
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Sunday
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We couldn’t kill the worlds corals if we wanted to: They already suffered for two thousand years and recovered
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Saturday
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The Climate Crisis was Christopher Columbus’s fault — “a mutant offspring of European Scientific racism”
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During the recent warmest decades on record, Earth suffered under the highest CO2 levels of the last 800,000 years. Life responded to this devastating situation by — flourishing. There are now some 4 billion tons more living matter on the planet than there was in 1993. What a calamity. (And what a lot of carbon credits.)
It has, naturally, got nothing to do with warmth and aerial fertilizer. The researchers tell us it due to that force of nature known as “good luck”. Remember, human CO2 emissions were pollution that was going to afflict life on Earth. After twenty years of predicting the loss of forests and species, it turned out that biology bloomed instead. Notch up another model “success”. The press release headline: Good luck reverses global forest loss. (What else would we expect from UNSW?)
To those who know basic biology — and that almost half the dry weight of plants is carbon, sucked straight out of the air — this is not so much good luck as one entirely foreseeable and foreseen consequence of rising CO2. Acquiring carbon is often a plant’s hardest task. When the sun comes up, a cornfield begins sucking, and by lunch time […]
A paper that is nearly 60 years old shows us just how intrinsically important CO2 is to life.
An acre of corn is a living machine drawing CO2 from the air around it. In windless conditions, CO2 concentrations over a cornfield build up each night as CO2 diffuses from higher air and the organic matter and bacteria create CO2 from the soil. A paper by Chapman et al from 1954[1], shows that as soon as the sun comes up, to power-up those dormant photosynthetic cells, the plants rapidly draw down as much CO2 as possible, and when the CO2 levels fall too low, plant growth surely slows.
On a windless day CO2 values rose to 410ppm overnight and fell to 210ppm during the morning.
This graph shows CO2 content of the air over a cornfield on a still day (no wind). Sunrise occurs at 5am and CO2 levels plummet til 8am, reaching their lowest by 1pm, which is nearly half the CO2 concentration of the peak reached overnight. The corn is affecting CO2 levels in air even as high as 150m or 500ft above. These level out by around 8am and only start to increase again, a couple of hours […]
scirpus olneyi | Smithsonian
Not only does one particular grass seem quite happy at 700ppm, it was absorbing 30% more carbon dioxide, and there was no sign that it might not be equally happy at even higher levels. Will disaster strike the world at 401ppm? This 19 year study suggests (again) it might not be so bad. Arguably, 700ppm might be better. Even the C4 plants (supposedly the ones which prefer low CO2) still absorbed 13% more CO2 at 700ppm. (Absorbing more carbon usually means growing faster.)
During the worst drought years, growth slowed dramatically, but drought-stricken plants with 700ppm of CO2 around them still absorbed 4% more.
From the Smithsonian
High CO2 Spurs Wetlands to Absorb More Carbon
Under elevated carbon dioxide levels, wetland plants can absorb up to 32 percent more carbon than they do at current levels, according to a 19-year study published in Global Change Biology from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. With atmospheric CO2 passing the 400 parts-per-million milestone this year, the findings offer hope that wetlands could help soften the blow of climate change.
Plant physiologist Bert Drake created the Smithsonian’s Global […]
Increasing CO2 makes life easier for plants that live in hot dry places.
Thanks to satellites we know the world has “greened up” since 1980, but we were not sure how much of that was due to the fertilizing effect of CO2. To solve that, one group suggests we need to look in warm arid environments where water is the predominant limiting factor. These are the areas which ought to show whether CO2 was really helping plants grow, because when there is more CO2 it enables plants to use water more efficiently for photosynthesis. In places where there is already a lot of water, it won’t make as much difference. So Donohue et al. did that, studying regions with a low level of rainfall. They found that the fertilization effect is real and significant and that the cover in these arid zones increased 11% from 1982 – 2010 and CO2 played a significant role.
(Thanks to pollution, trees are invading grasslands. Whatever will the Greens do to get us back to the Halycon pre-carbon days? Call Gunns?)
CO2 may be the only “pollution” that greens the deserts.
“Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 […]
A little under half (typically about 45%) of the dry weight of any plant is carbon, and almost all that “C” came from CO2 in the atmosphere. No wonder plants love more CO2.
Trees and bushes can grow out of cracks in rocks because they suck the carbon right out of the air. Likewise hydroponics is only possible because the building blocks come from liquid and aerial fertilizer.
CO2 is about the only “pollution” you can pump around plants and watch them grow faster, stronger, taller and indeed more resistant to most of the stresses that normally bother a plant.
8.2 out of 10 based on 25 ratings […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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