Wood Romances

  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 #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...