Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #8 " and " Fact #9 " want us to believe that more CO2 means more plant growth (Fact 8) and allow crops to feed more people globally (Fact 9). The claims here are not really new compared to other claims in this list of "facts," and we've already seen why these claims are misleading at best. We've seen in two posts ( here and here ) that increasing CO2 doesn't just cause greening through CO2 fertilization but also warming through the greenhouse effect. The latter increases heat stress for plants and limit their ability to make use of additional CO2 for photosynthesis. We've also seen here that CO2 Coalition just assumes that increases in corn yields are due to increased CO2 when the sources they cite actually attribute increases in crop yields to better hybrid corn and better technology. The logic of these facts is very similar. In "fact 9," we're shown a graph of grain production with CO2 and tempe...

  CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #29 ," " Fact #30 " and " Fact #31 " are essentially the same strawman attacks having to do with claims about droughts that nobody is actually saying. They basically observe here that there has been no change in droughts in the US, and droughts are declining globally. Here are the graphs they use to support this point. And yet who said otherwise? It's well-documented that warmer air holds more water, with water vapor increasing by ~7% for every 1 C warming. So on average, we should expect to see decreases in droughts as a global average. CO2 Coalition is attacking as strawman here. Climate scientists also observe that in more arid areas with less water availability, warming increases vapor pressure deficit (VPD) which should drive local and regional increases in the frequency and intensity of droughts (I cover more about this here ). This is observed in the American Southwest and in other areas around the world. In wetter...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #25 " claims that increasing CO2 causes moister soil. We're told that increasing CO2 concentrations means that plant stomata are open for shorter periods, so plants become more efficient (water use efficiency or WUE increases) and don't take as much water from soils. From this they claim that "CO2 fertilization has been linked to decreases in global fire, drought and heat waves." It's true that studies have shown that in some ecosystems, elevated CO2 has been linked to better water use efficiency (WUE) and improved soil moisture. But CO2 Coalition is being a bit selective in the information they present, even in the two examples they provide. In their first example, they cite research from CSIRO that showed that increasing CO2 has lead to a boost in green foliage in desert areas, but there are also secondary effects: "On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forest...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact 23 " claims that "CO2 increase is enhancing corn production" by a lot. This is such an astounding fact that CO2 Coalition devoted a whole sentence to defend its claim. "In the United States, corn production (bushels per acre) is steadily increasing as CO2 levels increase. This steady and continued increase cannot be explained simply by better technology." Here's the graph they show to support this from Nielson 2020 , which is an article posted on Purdue's website. The article says nothing about CO2. Instead, it says that corn yields were positively affected by several "miracles" that resulted in three stages of corn yields. Corn yields were stagnant from 1866-1936 until the rapid adoption of hybrid corn. Rapid adoption of double-cross hybrid corn by American farmers began in the late 1930's, in the waning years of the U.S. Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Within a very few years after that, the national yiel...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #22 " and " Fact #24 " are designed to make you think that warm is better than cold for global temperatures and climate scientists like Michael Mann we should return the Earth's temperature to an "ideal" temperature during the Little Ice Age (LIA). In their "fact #22," they claim that "The most dramatic advances in civilization took place during the last four warm periods—including our own. The advancement of science, technology and the arts have been directly linked to warmer weather." To support this, they show a graph of Greenland Summit temperatures from the GISP2 ice core.   I've  pointed out elsewhere  many of the problems they have when they use this graph to confuse local with global temperatures and misplot "current temperatures" from Box 2009. But here they add another layer of confusion to the claims they've made before because none of these "advancements in science, tech...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #21 " claims that "IPCC models have overstated warming by up to three time too much." According to this claim to fact, John Christy's testimony on "February 2016 to the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space & Technology included remarkable charts that document just how much the models overestimate temperatures. The red line in the chart shows the average of 102 climate model runs completed by Christy and his team at the University of Alabama at Huntsville using the models on which the IPCC itself relies. Also shown on the chart are the actual, observed temperatures. The models exaggerate warming, on average, two and a half times the actual temperature (or three times over in the climate-crucial tropics). Here's the graph they use to support this claim. The above graph reports to show 32 models and 102 model runs within the CMIP5 model ensemble. They are limited to those runs in the KNMI Climate Explorer. The models are s...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #15 " wants us to believe that temperatures even 8°C warmer than today would be just fine for humanity. In order to make that claim, they need to perform a few tricks. The first trick is to make that 8°C Greenland temperatures instead of global temperatures. The second trick is to redefine  "today" as "the mean of the past millennium." Here's how they say it The results revealed that the Eemian interglacial warm period, between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, was much warmer than previously thought. In fact, it was, 8°C (14.4°F) warmer than today. Their source for this is Dahl-Jensen 2013[1], which details the results of the new North Greenland Eemian (NEEM) Ice Drilling ice core. The paper concludes: NEEM surface temperatures after the onset of the Eemian (126,000 years ago) peaked at 8 ± 4 degrees Celsius above the mean of the past millennium, followed by a gradual cooling that was probably driven by the decreasing summer i...

CO2 Coalition's " Fact #32 " tries to make a point from Glacier Bay's glacial history. They feel like since glaciers have retreated in  Glacier Bay since the late 1700s, that this is some how an argument that humans aren't causing the planet to warm. Here's a map with annotations from the CO2 Coalition. The declarations of what is "natural melting" and "man-made melting" are simply the opinions of CO2 Coalition. The map as published by the USGS looks like this. The figure's description describes how the southern terminus positions have changed since 1794, but interestingly I can find nothing this description or associated text any reference to the attribution of when the retreat was "natural" and when it transitioned to "man-made." All that appears to be made up by the CO2 Coalition. Here's the description: Location map of Glacier Bay National Park showing terminus positions and dates of retreat of the Little Ic...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #11 " (together with " Fact #12 ") claim that a "tipping point" occurred in 1800 that caused mountain glaciers to melt (and sea levels to rise), and since this "tipping point" occurred before major increases in CO2, both the glacial melting and sea level rise "are directly the result of the natural warming that began in the late 17th-century." They assert that glacial retreat (and sea level rise) "continues at about the same rate today as it was 150 years ago." The graph they use to support this claim was taken from Oerlemans 2005[1] with their own annotations. The paper they reference is pretty interesting, though there is absolutely no claim in the paper of any "tipping point" in 1800, and the "190-year trend of glacier shortening" is an annotation of CO2 Coalition, not a claim of the paper. The actual graph from the paper shows no "tipping point" but a gradual accele...

CO2 Coalition 's " Fact #18 " is also mostly trivial save for an implication they make from it that is really just a non sequitur . The  Milankovich Cycles (sometimes stated simply as orbital cycles) have to do with cyclical variability in the shape of the Earth's orbit or the tilt and wobble of the Earth's axis. They are: Eccentricity - cyclical variability in the shape of the Earth's orbit. Due to the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn, the shape of the Earth's orbit becomes more circular (eccentricity of 0.0034) to more elliptical (eccentricity of 0.058) every 100,000 years. Obliquity - cyclical variability in the tilt of the Earth's axis, which varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees with respect to the Earth's orbital plane every 41,000 years. The more tilted the Earth's axis of rotation, the more extreme seasonal variability becomes. Each hemisphere experiences hotter summers and colder winters. Precession - cyclical variability in...

CO2 Coalition's " Fact #14 " appears to be pretty trivial, and as best I can tell, it exists here to scare people into being afraid of a coming ice age. Over the last million years (since the Mid-Pleistocene Transition), glacial cycles have been about 100K years long, synced with orbital cycles. For most of each glacial cycle, the Earth is in a glacial period, with continental ice sheets extending into mid-latitudes, but for about 10K-15K years, the Earth experiences an "interglacial" period, when global temperatures increase and continental ice sheets retreat. Our current interglacial, the Holocene, has lasted about 11,700 years, and the major ice sheets are restricted to Greenland and Antarctica. None of this is particularly controversial or relevant to whether AGW is causing harm to human civilization. Now technically, the above graph shows the last 420K years of the current ice age. There are not multiple ice ages in the Quaternary. Even the interglacial per...