New Study Destroys Major Tenet of Climate Cultism by Confirming Carbon Dioxide is a Life-Essential Gas
“Social Cost of Carbon” shouldn’t have been set so high by Biden’s EPA, because plants do just dine with more carbon and warmer temperatures.
One of the major issues I have had with “climate change” reporting is that articles portray carbon dioxide as “toxic”.
This assertion is a blatant lie, as I have often stated in discussing this issue at Legal Insurrection.
One of the biggest purveyors of this inanity was the Biden administration’s team at the Environmental Protection Agency. Team Biden used a report to justify its update to Obama’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) policy, which was aimed at justifying stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.
Now a study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports challenges the Biden administration’s fivefold increase in its SCC estimate, which was partly based on projections of global crop yield declines. The research, conducted by economist Ross McKitrick, re-examines and extends the dataset used in previous studies that influenced the SCC estimate.
The title pretty much sums up the key point: Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision. It reviews the 2014 database set that was used to justify the hefty increase in regulations are carbon dioxide.
The paper makes many key points, including that the original dataset was less than complete.
The original dataset used for the SCC update contained 1,722 records, but only 862 were usable due to missing variables. McKitrick recovered 360 additional records, increasing the sample size to 1,222.
Interestingly, reanalysis of the larger dataset yielded significantly different results from previous studies. While earlier analyses suggested yield declines for all crop types even at low levels of warming, the new and improved information suggests the potential positive global average crop yield changes, even with up to a 5°C temperature increase
The study found that adaptation efforts and CO2 fertilization have beneficial effects on crop yields, which I have noted before. It seems like a good time to share this video of Dr. William Happer, who offers a rational perspective on carbon dioxide.
In a nutshell, the research concludes that the climate change-related agricultural damage estimates used to justify the SCC increase are too pessimistic and that the large implied revisions to the SCC are unsupported by the extended data. Because crop yields don’t crash, as asserted in the report Biden’s EPA used, then the rationale for substantially increasing the “social cost of carbon” disappears.
Watts Up With That Contributor Vijay Jayaraj also reviews the paper’s findings and offers guidance on how the Trump administration should use this finding.
First, the social cost of carbon calculation needs a reset. A realistic assessment would show that carbon dioxide is a benefit, not a pollutant, and that increasing CO2 adds to global productivity rather than imposes costs on society.
The EPA must revisit its numbers, stripping out inflated agricultural damages and grounding its estimates in all the data available. It is time to look at the facts, trust the real science, and end the irrational governmental messaging that feeds climate hysteria.
Now let’s review an issue, which I argue is related to this one. Scientific fraud in research papers has become an alarming trend in recent years, with significant implications for the integrity of academic publishing and public trust in science. The problem has grown substantially, with the proportion of retracted papers more than tripling in the past decade.
Scientific journals are usually a source of reputable research and information, but recently thousands of fraudulent papers have been published in those journals and have needed to be retracted. “The proportion of papers published in any given year that go on to be retracted — has more than tripled in the past decade,” said Nature.
“In 2022, it exceeded 0.2%.” Wiley, a more than 200-year-old publishing company, has retracted more than 11,300 compromised papers and closed four journals in the past two years. The company also announced that it will be closing 19 others. Several other publishing companies have been required to take similar actions. “Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole,” said The Wall Street Journal.
If ‘science’ is based on only the data that support the conclusion policymakers want, then it is no longer science. And if Biden’s EPA policies for SCC were based on shoddy work, then I am delighted that Trump is axing the agency’s primary research body Office of Research and Development), potentially cutting more than 1,000 positions.
The Trump administration plans to eliminate a major research body of the Environmental Protection Agency, possibly cutting more than 1,000 employees, according to documents on the government’s reduction in force agenda.
The EPA’s Office of Research and Development would be eliminated “as an EPA National Program Office,” documents reviewed by Democratic staffers on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee say. A portion of the documents was shared with CBS News.
“Currently, the Office of Research and Development has 1,540 positions (excluding special government employees and public health officers), of which we anticipate a majority (50-75%) will not be retained,” the documents say.
The documents also state that the EPA will request an exemption from the Office of Personnel Management to reduce the required 60-day notice of termination to a 30-day notice period for impacted employees.
The fact that carbon dioxide was ever painted as “toxic” argues that real science was jettisoned in favor of climate cultism…and Trump is in his constitutional rights to separate that faith from governmental policies based on real information.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
“Now a study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports challenges the Biden administration’s fivefold increase in its SCC estimate, which was partly based on projections of global crop yield declines.”
Crop yield declines from more CO2?
You know what greenhouse operators do to increase yields? They add CO2 to the air in the greenhouse.
You know what planted aquarium keepers do to get lush growth from the plants? They dissolve CO2 into the water.
You know what reef aquarium keepers do to encourage coral growth? They use CO2 to dissolve calcium carbonate so it’s available for the plants.
CO2 is nowhere near too high. It’s close to too low, in fact.
“Available for the coral” is what I meant in the fourth line, of course.
No, crop yields don’t decline from more CO2, but the claim was that crop yields decline from more heat, and that at some point the increase in yield from the extra CO2 is less than the decrease from the extra heat. A claim that turned out to be either exaggerated or outright false.
Plants would do worse with less water, rather than heat. Heat is often a problem because in hot places there’s also less precipitation, and more water can be lost in hot weather during transpiration. But farmers irrigate, so that’s generally not a problem and why agriculture can be effective even if environments that don’t normally sustain thriving plant life.
More CO2 in the atmosphere also conserves water. Plants transpire through holes called stomata. They don’t breathe like animals, passage of CO2 into the plant is passive, meaning the CO2 just drifts in. But as CO2 drifts in, H2O drifts out (up to 90% of a plant’s water loss is due to transpiration). About 100 molecules of water are lost for every molecule of CO2 that goes in. As the amount of CO2 in the air increases, less water is lost for every CO2 molecule captured, because the capture rate of the CO2 goes up.
Separation of “Church” (aka Climate Cult) and State would be good. Also, the period of the dinosaurs was much warmer, much greener and with much more CO2. Per Google that period lasted nearly 200M years. A “cost” of CO2 at a level anything like the current one is nonsense and I do not need any study to know it – just a brain.
Wow! Science just learned that CO2 is good for plants AGAIN!
The last time they learned this was in 2016.
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/nasa-study-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-will-help-and-hurt-crops/
Where is Sarah Hoyt’s shocked face?
https://youtu.be/xRfQzMgvfDA?si=IBxqgIPLxwNl5cnU
The going story is that CO2 increases increase the altitude of the final reradiation into space, radiation jumping from one molecule to the next and making its way back to space. More CO2, the higher the last jump before leaving earth. But the higher it is, the colder it is, and that means that the earth radiates less energy than otherwise back into space, and hence global warming. I don’t endorse the theory but that’s what you have to refute.
Whether it’s good for plants or not doesn’t figure in.
That presupposes that we know what “normal” temperature is for the Earth, and that temps warmer than that are harmful. Since we don’t automatically know those things (evidence suggests surface temps on Earth have been both colder and warmer in the past), looking at what actually happens with a warmer Earth and increasing CO2 (in the real world, not just models) would seem to be important.
molecular weight of air averages out about 28.96 g/mol; molecular weight of carbon dioxide is 44.009 g/mol: which means that carbon dioxide is at least 50% heavier than air which means that carbon dioxide sinks to the ground; the proportion of carbon dioxide does not increase as altitude increases: to the contrary it decreases.
it was some genius science writer for the NY Times who fell asleep in high school chemistry class who confused the dioxide with the poisonous monoxide (M.W. 28.01 g/mol) and the disinformation has been spreading rapidly ever since
All that matters is the CO2 portion of the atmosphere, and it distributes independently of the other gasses in the absence of mixing (long free path, i.e. high altitude). In particular it doesn’t sink to the ground but is its own indepedent atmosphere.
Per Google AI: Yes, carbon dioxide (CO2) is denser than air and therefore tends to accumulate near the ground due to its higher molecular weight.
Let go of a helium-filled balloon, for the opposite effect.
A balloon keeps all the gas together. There is no pressure difference for independent free-flying molecules though. A Boltzmann equation instead of the Navier Stokes equation. CO2 has its own scale height, O2 another, Nitrogen another, etc. The escape mechanism is called diffusion. There’s no diffusion through a balloon.
This is an obvious thing that everyone other than climatards understood and is normally something you learn in grade school when you first hear the term photosynthesis.
“Interestingly, reanalysis of the larger dataset yielded significantly different results from previous studies”
Interesting that data refuting the preferred outcome was somehow left out of the study.
“[I]nanity” should really have been “insanity.”
I think the better argument is that the social benefits of carbon are being ignored by climate activists. We know the costs — global warming (supposedly). But we also know the benefits — increased life expectancy (that ambulance ride is powered by diesel), higher quality of life (nice, warm homes), more food and so on. And, I think, it is pretty obvious that the benefits greatly exceed the costs.
That is the point. Climate activists do want increased qualify of life except for themselves and their supporters. Climate “science” has always been about controlling what people do and, more importantly, controlling where funds are spent. The climate grift is about wealth redistribution at its core.
Uh we knew that
John Kerry is having a fit. He based his govt grift job and his reputation on toxic CO2.
Over 40 years ago I taught 4h, 5th and 6 graders basic earth science/ geology, human anatomy (for their level – not the leftist garbage of today); basic astronomy and basic chemistry. We are not talking about an elite school system.
Every student had to learn that plants exhale oxygen, inhale CO2; animals exhale CO2, inhale oxygen. The earths’s system have been created to keep both groups alive. The leftist preachings of doom and gloom are not just wrong, they are lies. Those who believe AOC’s prediction that the earth will die around 2030 are so wrong. This lying to kids is definitely another leftist
Wrong. Stop scaring the kids – it’s unfair to them.
Leave a Comment