Wood Romances

CO2 Coalition 's " fact #4 " is virtually identical to its " fact #1 " but just on a different time scale. All they did with this "fact" is change the scale and repeat the same lies with the same dose of alarmism. Rather than showing a climate model of CO2 for 140 million years, they show proxy evidence for CO2 for the last 420,000 years. They simply repeat here that CO2 fell to ~180 ppm, and we should be alarmed by this because below 150 ppm "terrestrial plant life cannot exist." And if you're not sufficiently scared by this lie, they reinforce it and then imply the fossil fuel industry saved us from a mass extinction.  We came within about 30 ppm (30 molecules out of every one million) to the extinction of most plant life on land, and with it the extinction of all higher terrestrial life-forms that depend on it. Bear in mind that, before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we weren’t sure that we wouldn’t cross that critical 150-ppm ...

Sometimes I still hear objections to AGW that claim that humans could not be causing the atmosphere to warm because our emissions constitute only a tiny fraction of the CO2 that's in the atmosphere. There are several forms of this claim, but most have to do with the fact that human CO2 emissions are a small fraction of total emissions every year, which of course is true. What they don't tell you is that natural sinks remove what natural sources add each year, and a little more, making the natural carbon cycle a net sink. So while human emissions are small compared to natural, they are responsible for flipping the carbon cycle from being a net sink to a net source of CO2. Human activity is responsible for virtually all the increase in CO2 above preindustrial levels. The graph below shows various components of the carbon cycle with averages for 2011-2020. Here the natural carbon cycle removes about 5.9 GtC annually, while human emissions from fossil fuels and land use change cont...

This is part 1 of a two part book review.  A few years ago, a man named Gregory Wrightstone appeared in several of the Facebook groups I participate in. He participated in debates with other members over issues related to climate change, frequently using graphs that he had made. It turns out he was working on a book, and as best I can tell, he was testing his content in debate groups to hear objections to his claims before self-publishing the book. That's a bit of speculation on my part, but I noticed that his book sometimes was changed from what he had posted in the discussion groups, and I like to think that he altered his arguments as a result of conversations with others. He self-published his book under the sufficiently political title, Inconvenient Facts: The Science Al Gore Doesn't Want You to Know .[1] The not-so-subtle implication here is that Al Gore misrepresented the facts and science of climate change and doesn't want you to be informed, but Mr. Wrightstone is...

Little Big Econ State Forest One objection I frequently hear to climate science is that the human contribution to the increase in CO2 concentrations is small, so reducing our carbon emissions will have little to no effect on global temperatures. This claim is completely misguided, and calculations using estimates of human carbon emissions can settle this pretty quickly. The following calculations are through 2018, with CO2 levels at 410 ppm, about 130 ppm higher than pre-industrial 280 pm. We can provide a rough estimate of how much of the 410 ppm is human by looking at empirical data regarding anthropogenic CO2 emissions  and a couple conversion factors:[1] 3.67GtC = 1 GtCO2  1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2. According to the global carbon budget through 2018, humans have emitted 441 GtC through fossil fuel use and 203 GtC through land use, for a total of 604 GtC anthropogenic emissions.[2] That translates to 2217 Gt CO2 emissions. About 50% of that amount stays in the atmosphere. So: ...