Eco Worriers: “CO2 is a pollutant!” Gaia: “Tell that to the biosphere.” Biosphere: “Yumm, burp!”
The SeaWiFS instrument aboard the Seastar satellite has been collecting ocean data since 1997. By monitoring the color of reflected light via satellite, scientists can determine how successfully plant life is photosynthesizing. A measurement of photosynthesis is essentially a measurement of successful growth, and growth means successful use of ambient carbon. This animation shows an average of 10 years worth of SeaWiFS data. Dark blue represents warmer areas where there tends to be a lack of nutrients, and greens and reds represent cooler nutrient-rich areas which support life. The nutrient-rich areas include coastal regions where cold water rises from the sea floor bringing nutrients along and areas at the mouths of rivers where the rivers have brought nutrients into the ocean from the land.
See an animation of the Earth;s Biosphere: 512×288 (30 fps) MPEG-1 10 MB. More here at NASA SVS
With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post, Don Mills, Ontario
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began.
GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere –the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe’s production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it’s been in decades, perhaps in centuries.
Until the 1980s, ecologists had no way to systematically track growth in plant matter in every corner of the Earth — the best they could do was analyze small plots of one-tenth of a hectare or less. The notion of continuously tracking global production to discover the true state of the globe’s biota was not even considered.
Then, in the 1980s, ecologists realized that satellites could track production, and enlisted NASA to collect the data. For the first time, ecologists did not need to rely on rough estimates or anecdotal evidence of the health of the ecology: They could objectively measure the land’s output and soon did — on a daily basis and down to the last kilometer.
The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA satellite data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth’s vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.
Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature’s fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”
From the 2004 abstract: Our results indicate that global changes in climate have eased several critical climatic constraints to plant growth, such that net primary production increased 6% (3.4 petagrams of carbon over 18 years) globally. The largest increase was in tropical ecosystems. Amazon rain forests accounted for 42% of the global increase in net primary production, owing mainly to decreased cloud cover and the resulting increase in solar radiation.
Lush as the planet may now be, it is as nothing compared to earlier times, when levels of CO2 and Earth temperatures were far higher. In the age of the dinosaur, for example, CO2 levels may have been five to 10 times higher than today, spurring a luxuriantly fertile planet whose plant life sated the immense animals of that era. Planet Earth is also much cooler today than during the hothouse era of the dinosaur, and cooler than it was 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warming Period, when the Vikings colonized a verdant Greenland. Greenland lost its colonies and its farmland during the Little Ice Age that followed, and only recently started to become green again.
This blossoming Earth could now be in jeopardy, for reasons both natural and man-made. According to a growing number of scientists, the period of global warming that we have experienced over the past few centuries as Earth climbed out of the Little Ice Age is about to end. The oceans, which have been releasing their vast store of carbon dioxide as the planet has warmed — CO2 is released from oceans as they warm and dissolves in them when they cool — will start to take the carbon dioxide back. With less heat and less carbon dioxide, the planet could become less hospitable and less green, especially in areas such as Canada’s Boreal forests, which have been major beneficiaries of the increase in GPP and NPP.
Doubling the jeopardy for Earth is man. Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
If these governments are right, they will have done us all a service. If they are wrong, the service could be all ill, with food production dropping world wide, and the countless ecological niches on which living creatures depend stressed. The second order effects could be dire, too. To bolster food production, humans will likely turn to energy intensive manufactured fertilizers, depleting our store of non-renewable resources. Techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere also sound alarms. Carbon sequestration, a darling of many who would mitigate climate change, could become a top inducer of earthquakes, according to Christian Klose, a geohazards researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Because the carbon sequestration schemes tend to be located near cities, he notes, carbon-sequestration-caused earthquakes could exact an unusually high toll.
Amazingly, although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction, Canada and other countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt. Environmentalists, who ordinarily would demand a full-fledged environmental assessment before a highway or a power plant can be built, are silent on the need to question proponents or examine alternatives.
Earth is on a roll. Governments are too. We will know soon enough if we’re rolled off a cliff.
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ROTFL, you can’t even find the ball field!
White rabbits at the North Pole would be awesome. Enough of them could compensate for the albedo loss due to carbon soot unless their droppings accumulated to the point of canceling their fuwwy refwective pwoperties.
Not to mention they could function as a food supply for polar bears.
Santa might be able lower his carbon footprint by using locally grown fur in gift manufacturing.
Harp seals could be saved by the tens of thousands with the substitution of Newfie bunny bashing.
Or, can you imagine the thrill of hunting white rabbits on the furry tundra. You wouldn’t be able to see them until it’s too late. It would be completely sporting.
REPLY: Careful, last thing I need is the PETA peckers howling here.
MA,
I think your home run went foul. Strangely enough when I go to the link you provided underneath your Dyson quote the first Dyson quote it shows is the quote supplied by Anthony. That is, ““My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.”, not the quote you supplied, ““One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.”
Your quote is further down in the text and is, I think, taken out of context and misrepresents Dyson’s beliefs. If you read the entire section from which your quote is extracted you will see the Dyson thinks global warming is a problem tho, in his words, “its importance is exaggerated” (from the sentence before your quote). Even your quote is not indicative of a pro-AGW stance as he states CO2 is ‘one of the main causes’, not the main cause of a problem that is ‘exaggerated’.
What’s even more interesting is that this section was written in August 2007 and, if you were to read the entire section that contains your ‘home run’, Dyson mentions the need to measure the amount of biomass created by the additional CO2 put into the atmosphere that is absorbed by biomass, “We don’t know how big a fraction of our emissions is absorbed by the land, since we have not measured the increase or decrease of the biomass. The number that I ask you to remember is the increase in thickness, averaged over one half of the land area of the planet, of the biomass that would result if all the carbon that we are emitting by burning fossil fuels were absorbed. The average increase in thickness is one hundredth of an inch per year. ”
I think there’s a danger in selective quoting in anger because there is a tendency to fail to read the quote within its proper context, something I think you have done.
I’ll leave you with one last Dyson quote from the conclusion of his climate change heresy, I found it most interesting (I’d like to thank you for providing the link btw, Dyson is a very smart man),
” When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models. “
Ya know, “There’s diversity, then there’s Diversity.” – The Gospel According to The Greens
examp., courtesy tooby: polar-adapted white rabbits are not Diverse; unless Polar Bear populations are increasing; which never happens; even if they are.
Here in Oregon, my wife and I have noticed this spring that all of our trees, bushes and other plants seem to have more and larger leaves this year, and the entire garden seems more lush than we can ever remember. We were just discussing this last week.
I doubt that this is coincidence.
Declining Polar Bear populations? Hmmmm.
“A survey of the animals’ numbers in Canada’s eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind’s interference in the environment.
In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today.
“There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears,” said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1545036/Polar-bears-'thriving-as-the-Arctic-warms-up‘.html
Re: Fluffy White Rabbits: It’s just a little fluffy rabbit. That’s not a rabbit. It’s vicious man eating beast!!
Re: Fluffy White Rabbits. sorry, missed the YouTube link above.
Wow Anthony, you sure hit a sore spot with this entry!! It’s revealing how quickly the arguments put forward by AGW proponents descend into the shrillness and irrationality of personal abuse when faced with any study that contradicts their “religion”.
As always, scientific method, open mindedness and healthy scepticism will win out in the end. The burgeoning popularity of your excellent blog is surely proof of this – hopefully the AGW debate is reaching a far more valuable tipping point than the one Mssrs Gore and Hanson had in mind!
Klockarman,
Good for Oregon
Here in the south of Greece we have had a second year of sparse rains and my cottage garden is not doing well, CO2 or no. The wild artichokes never bloomed, the young olive trees dropped their flowers and the pistachio trees have little fruit. I did not even hae to cut the weeds by machine. The few that have come up I cut by hand.
Soon we will have water rationing. We go through this periodically.Twenty years ago you would be fined if you washed your car with running water.
I watch the weather in western Europe where they are having floods and wish there were a way to spread the bounty as equitably as CO2 is spread.
Europe had a mild winter. We kept all the heat from China and north america :). Must be all that CO2, we are great breathers out, as yoga is catching around here. :).
It’s funny how they have to add that last phrase, when it’s completely irrelevant. They’re thriving not BECAUSE of man’s interference in the environment, they’re thriving because they’re thriving. Such silly crap.
Somebody pointed me to this lovely CO2 world map.
http://www-airs.jpl.nasa.gov/Products/CarbonDioxide/
Unfortunately it is only for July 2003.
Does anybody know of more such maps? Why are there no others on the nasa site? Politically unsound as they show most CO2 coming from west to east over the industrialized countries?
It would be great if we could have a daily map, the way we have with temperatures in http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst.html. Even a monthly one would be fine.
then one could see details and make correlations with growth etc.
Goodness me.!
I just went to sleep and when I get up there is all this anger on the blog. MA seems to have changed the atmosphere with his accusations and I have never seen Anthony getting so angry on here before.
One of the best things about this blog is the calm rationality of it all.
I can understand the anger.
It comes from allowing other viewpoints on the blog… a strength of your site Anthony.
I asked at the start of this article if someone could help me with understanding something.
On a previous article there was a link to a professor in eastern europe who had done a lot of work on ice core ,measurements of CO2 and he suggested that the common belief that CO2 has increased since the industrial age was based on not understanding what happens when the cores are extracted. Pressure effects combined with the extractor liquids etc changed the composition of the trapped air bubbles. So I was believeing this and thought that the increase in CO2 might not be true. Then there is this article which seems like it confirms increased CO2 and increased warming.
I can see how “deniers” can argue that Earth is not warming. I thought there was legitimate thinking that CO2 had not significantly increased. This article seemed to suggest warming and increased CO2. To say this is a good thing is one argument. But it is difficult to argue this at the same time as saying that there is no warming and no effect of CO2.
It seems like having your cake and eating it..
” there is no warming,,,, but if there is it will be good for us” Does not form a good line in arguments. It could be legitimate , but it does seem to give the appearance of a lack of consistency. A bit like a child who says I did not do it, but if I did it was someone else’s fault. It is the appearance that matters when I have discussions with our Geography department in school.
Can anyone help me with this?
I admire MA! It, MA that is, was able to distract the discussion away from the essential thread quite well. At least I found myself more fascinated with the MA vs. Watts match than the original discussion.
Now I am in the process of ordering a couple of books by Freeman Dyson. He, will most likely add quite a bit to my understanding of the world. What an interesting man.
However, I would like to make a clarification for Ron Broberg, unless I missed someone else doing it.
It is quite easy to draw two, on the surface, opposing scientific conclusions from the data. Your reference, speaks of growing biological deserts. That is probably correct. However, Watts speaks of the whole globe. Both observations are correct. The biological deserts are a subset of the whole globe. What is missing from your reference is context. It should speak of how the rest of the biosphere is doing. If the rest of the planet is showing increased biomass then these “deserts” are not the primary story. The big story is that the biosphere is blooming. Watts article also indicated that parts of the globe showed a decline. So, the original article recognize both situations. Your article ignores the overall fact of increase. I find your article limited in focus. It speaks only of the oceans. It is ignoring land surfaces.
What ever happened with that list of 2500 IPCC reviewers, did the UN ever release that information? Sort of odd that MA would complain about a list of 32,000 scientists posted on the internet, as if this is some sort of bother for him/her, when I’d almost gaurantee MA never attacked the IPCC AR4, which refuses to list it’s scientist/reviewers altogether.
Knuckle bump on that Karl Quisenberry trackdown, Rev.
MA W-H-O-S-E Y-O-U-R D-A-D-D-Y ?
heh
for thee, anna v
“… I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.” from Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Captain of your soul?
But what about your brain?
A single comic ray
could render it quite lame.
And with that lame brain
will you master fate?
If there is no God
then fate need not you heed.
But if He does exist
you surely can succeed.
Captain of your soul?
Yes.
Master of your fate?
No;
but perhaps First Mate.
anna, thanks for the inspiration
I try to tell everyone, but nobody listens.
Trolls like “MA” serve a purpose, although not the one they intend. Back when I still believed AGW was true (note, I wasn’t a Believer, but simply assumed it was true, as that was all I heard in the lamestream media, and I was still a Dem), one of the things that I noticed when I began looking for some actual science backing AGW was the shrillness, and the irrational nature of many of the AGW proponents. It was “the debate is over”, “the consensus is clear”, and if you don’t believe its true then either you’re a shill for Big Oil, a whacko, idiot, Creationist (Lol, if I had a nickel for every time that meme gets trotted out I’d be rich), and on and on. Wow, thanks, that makes things so much clearer for me (sarc off). So, I became a skeptic in part due to True Believer AGW Trolls like “MA”. So, thanks, “MA”. Continue with your “work”. There are more and more of us every day. But, now, just fly off on your AGW broomstick to wherever you came from, OK?
Meanwhile, the cost of energy keeps going up. Meanwhile, China and others keep rolling up long-term deals, intellectual property, and market share that will persist for years to come. In the end, IMO, this kind of conversation is stupid on so many levels. No, Rico, you are wrong. This type of conversation is, in fact essential. The AGW lie has to be exposed. Science has been subverted by an ideology, and humanity does need science desperately. No good can come from basing any type of energy policy on a lie. Yes, of course we need to be R&Ding sensible alternative energies, and becoming more energy independent, less wasteful, etc. But, the AGW crowd has hijacked science and is holding it hostage to whatever agenda they have (they are a diverse bunch, from ideologues, to political and financial opportunists and everything in between). We can not allow that to happen. That, my friend, is what this is all about.
Having been raised on a ranch and learned how to measure the good times and bad re: growing season, I learned this:
If you can irrigate, sunny long summers provided three hay cuttings. Cool, short summers produced one good one and one small one. The first one was extra lush. The second one barely grew tall enough to be harvested, not because of drought but because the crop didn’t get enough suntime and started freezing in the fall. In total, warmer summers were better for extending the hay season and getting more bales (didn’t work so well for peas but peas are a cool summer crop). Last year we just made three cuttings but that last one was puny. The year before we got three pretty good cuttings. Three cuttings have been the norm going back to the 70’s when cool summers prevented the longer growing season necessary for three cuttings. Dry land wheat was a bust. This year, dry land wheat is so thick you can’t see the soil.
So it seems logical that when the sun results in a warmer planet, and warm ocean currents kick out CO2 instead of allowing it to sink, CO2 gets taken up by plants growing in warmer, sunnier climates, which in turn produces more plants for next year, etc.
This year will be a very short growing season, resulting in crop loss compared to previous seasons. Some blossoms have already frozen off the trees. Wines, hay, fruit, etc will all show increased prices due to lower harvest. Me thinks the pretty globe will be colored differently as cooling continues.
Which brings up my last thought in this post. If the current climate trend continues, we may soon be able to say that global cooling will be the next thing to deny. All we have to do is wait. But don’t plant a bunch of stuff thinking you can benefit from all that CO2. Your crop could freeze before it uses up the abundance.
Wonder if they’ll make Al Gore give his Nobel Peace Prize and Oscars back.
Either the use of the deforested lands for grazing, cane, or soy production dramatically increased its’ production
Actually it does. Modern agriculture will produce more tonnage of growth per acre than forests or native grassland, generally.
Oh Come On!
Mark my words – this is not good, not good at all. And it will be so easy to spin for the AGW’ers:
Oh No! Now we find out that the biodiversity in the oceans have increased. This means that now, because of us and our horrible CO2, there is TOO MUCH plant life in the oceans. This extra plant life is squeezing the other indigenous species out of their natural habitat, and this will soon cause the whole underwater ecosystem to collapse!!!
From MA
Who should we listen to?
1. some TV weather presenter with no scientific qualifications?
2. the consensus of every single national science academy of every industrialized country on the planet that confirms the reality of anthropogenic climate change?
Clue: it’s not (1)
Talking of clues – get one.<<
Interesting how the AGW crowd when actual facts are presented fall back to quote someone else’s opinion. I’ve found many on the left don’t know the difference between facts and opinions. Al Gore is one.
Some of these global warming tards even want to change the colour of the sky!
http://thetinycorner.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/scientist-wants-to-change-the-colour-of-the-sky/
No surprise at all.
This is merely confirming evidence of this truth.