Wood Romances

One of the frequently repeated tropes in climate contrarian circles is the supposed " line of death " at 150 ppm below which, we're told, all photosynthesis stops, so all plant life dies and there's a mass extinction of life on Earth. CO2 Coalition loves to trot out this trope to claim that, since CO2 became as low as 170 ppm during the glacial cycles of the Quaternary, we were dangerously close to a mass extinction. They claim we're still "CO2 starved." They also tell us that Berner's 2001 CO2 models shows "an alarming downward trend toward CO2 starvation."  We're then apparently supposed to be thankful for fossil fuel emissions that have saved us from perhaps the extinction of all life on earth. The DOE report, authored by the "climate working group" (CWG), tones down this rhetoric a bit, but it's essentially the same claim with slightly different numbers: "At the end of the last glaciation CO2 levels had fallen to...

 CO2 Coalition 's " fact #3 " repeats the mantra "CO2 is plant food." This of course is superficially true, but CO2 Coalition oversimplifies this point and then carefully omits important information. The effect is to mislead. Below is a picture of Dr. Craig Idso with 4 trees apparently showing that increasing CO2 produces larger trees. The citation for this apparently is another political propaganda group CO2 Science and "Idso 2013," which is cited as if it's a peer-reviewed study, but in fact it's just another political tract written by Idso at the "Center for the Study for Carbon Dioxide and Global Change" and "CO2 Science." Let's be clear at the beginning that it is of course superficially true that "CO2 in plant food" in the sense that photosynthesis requires CO2. The chemical reaction for photosynthesis is: 6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2 This reaction requires solar energy for plants to take water and carbon...