I can’t find the words to describe the illogic behind the EPA with this ruling. Perhaps it is best to say that bureaucrats don’t understand anything but regulations and leave it at that.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will early next week, possibly as soon as Monday, officially declare carbon dioxide a public danger, a trigger that could mean regulation for emitters across the economy, according to several people close to the matter. Story here.
To celebrate, surfacestations.org volunteer Gary Boden sends along this poster:
But there’s an interesting twist, just two days ago, the University of Wisconsin says that CO2 is accelerating forest growth. Of course, bureaucrats wouldn’t understand this, because they can’t regulate tree growth. Oh, wait.
From the University of Wisconsin-Madison press release:
Greenhouse gas carbon dioxide ramps up aspen growth
Dec. 4, 2009
The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be fueling more than climate change. It could also be making some trees grow like crazy.
That is the finding of a new study of natural stands of quaking aspen, one of North America’s most important and widespread deciduous trees. The study, by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota at Morris (UMM) and published today (Dec. 4) in the journal Global Change Biology, shows that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past 50 years have boosted aspen growth rates by an astonishing 50 percent.
“Trees are already responding to a relatively nominal increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 50 years,” says Rick Lindroth, a UW-Madison professor of ecology and an expert on plant responses to climate change. Lindroth, UW-Madison colleague Don Waller, and professors Christopher Cole and Jon Anderson of UMM conducted the new study.
The study’s findings are important as the world’s forests, which cover about 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface, play an important role in regulating climate and sequestering greenhouses gases. The forests of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, act as sinks for carbon dioxide, helping to offset the increase in levels of the greenhouse gas, widely viewed as a threat to global climate stability.
What’s more, according to the study’s authors, the accelerated growth rates of aspen could have widespread unknown ecological consequences. Aspen is a dominant tree in mountainous and northern forested regions of North America, including 42 million acres of Canadian forest and up to 6.5 million acres in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Aspen and their poplar cousins are considered “foundation species,” meaning they exert a strong influence on the plant and animal communities and dynamics of the forest ecosystems where they reside.
“We can’t forecast ecological change. It’s a complicated business,” explains Waller, a UW-Madison professor of botany. “For all we know, this could have very serious effects on slower growing plants and their ability to persist.”
Carbon dioxide, scientists know, is food for plants, which extract it from the air and through the process of photosynthesis convert it to sugar, plant food.
Previously, scientists have shown that plants and trees in growth chambers respond to levels of carbon dioxide well above levels in the atmosphere. The new study is the first to show that aspen in their native forest environments are already growing at accelerated rates due to rising ambient levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“It’s a change hiding right in front of us,” says Cole, a biologist at UMM. “Aspens respond to all sorts of things we had to account for — water, genetics and other factors — but the strong response to carbon dioxide surprised all of us.”
The study measured the growth rates of 919 trees from Wisconsin forests dominated by aspen and birch. Trees ranging in age from 5 to 76 years old were sampled and subjected to tree-ring analysis. Comparing the tree-ring data, a measure of annual tree growth, with records of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the researchers were able to correlate increased rates of growth with changes in the chemistry of the air.
The surprising increase in growth rates for the trees sampled in the study is coupled, the authors note, with moist conditions. By contrast, aspen in the western United States do not seem to grow as fast as those in the American Midwest, most likely due to recent extended periods of drought. Also, while the researchers found that aspen grow much faster in response to elevated carbon dioxide, similar effects have not been observed in other trees species, notably oak and pine.
Findings from the new study, the authors note, could augur revisions of the estimates of how much carbon northern temperate northern forests can sequester.
“Forests will continue to be important to soak up anthropogenic carbon dioxide,” says Waller. “But we can’t conclude that aspen forests are going to soak up excess carbon dioxide. This is going to plateau.”
“Aspens are already doing their best to mitigate our inputs,” agrees Cole. “The existing trees are going to max out in a couple of decades.”
The new study was funded by the National Science Foundation and UMM.
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RE: EPA ruling …
In 2002, over 400,000 people died from drowning worldwide. In the US, drowning claims nearly 3,600 lives annually and is the third leading cause of accidental death in the United States.
I guess water will be next. And Lordy, don’t even mention water vapor and clouds to your EPA.
The word has indeed gone mad.
The tree story is something positive in a sea of insanity.
Clive
I was laughing too hard at that poster to finish reading the piece but my first impression is this is a panicked CYA move by the EPA attemting to head off the total collapse of their justification and moral authority for continue defrauding the public with the AGW agenda.
We are just a step away from identifying “second hand carbon dioxide” risks and proceeding with the necessary regulation and legislation. In the first, “soft” phase, businesses will have to provide rooms where customers who chose to exhale CO2 will be sequestered. In the second phase, exhaling CO2 will be outlawed altogether.
“We can’t forecast ecological change. It’s a complicated business,” explains Waller, a UW-Madison professor of botany. “For all we know, this could have very serious effects on slower growing plants and their ability to persist.”
For all we know, there are fairies at the bottom of Dr. Waller’s garden. Ignoratio elenchi.
“…(T)he researchers were able to correlate increased rates of growth with changes in the chemistry of the air….”
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Association doesn’t prove causation.
Clive, you’re right, the world has indeed gone mad. But the tree story, however positive it may really be, is immediately being spun into just another alarmist wave in a sea of Climategate insanity. Logic is dead. Science is dead. Lunacy rules! Woo-woo science is King!
But with C02
it is simple indeed;
no burning of carbon
and please do not breath.
The life and anti-life groups are defining themselves.
Campbell Brown (CNN) has a upcoming episode on climategate.
They can say that carbon dioxide is steroids for the trees and that’s illegal.
Water must be ruled out since it is the positive feedback of atmospheric water vapour, and not CO2, that will stew your children in their own juices.
Then EPA will have banned the two substances, H2O and CO2, that supports Life itself on this planet.
And everyone will live happily ever after.
The end.
Should the EPA go the way of the IPCC – since they are both corrupt or at least very ignorant?
Hmmm.. does that mean I can complain to the EPA about the high levels of CO2 and contaminants in aircraft cabins?
This work, if accurate, seems to tell me three things. One is that CO2 is beneficial for at least some significant plant growth – I think we might have expected that. But it also tells us that tree rings can be shown to vary with CO2 levels and with precipitation/moisture and not just with temperature. It also tells us that tree growth may vary according to different variables in different species.
I’m pretty much a layman in this, but doesn’t it tell us that tree ring variation depends on a lot of things, including those, but not only those, measured in this study. If that is so, how is temperature selected out for past centuries?
“Aspens are already doing their best to mitigate our inputs,” agrees Cole. “The existing trees are going to max out in a couple of decades.”
Well, we just need to have a talk with them about trying harder.
Surprise? Well, perhaps to the “scientists”, but any greenhouse owner could have told them this would occur. And it isn’t only the aspens, but all green plants grow faster with higher levels of carbon dioxide.
But . . . oops, turns out that the forests getting greener will have bad consequences too . . . or perhaps not. Was “go green”. Now I guess it will have to change to “Stop the greening of planet Earth!”
Now what was that word the Irish use? Eejits. Yep, sure and they are that, they are.
“This is going to plateau.””
Yeah, because the only thing sucking up CO2 is Aspen trees. Idiots. If you look at a graph of U.S. corn yields, nest to a Mauna loa CO2 graph, it looks pretty similar. The Biosphere is HUGE. If there is a top end to what the Biosphere could sequester, I don’t think we’ll be finding it anytime soon. Oh, and as a bonus, all that Carbon, taken in by plants, and then sequestered in the soil, makes the top soil more fertile, so we can grow even more, well, green stuff. Recent studies at American Universities, are also showing that, with increased CO2, plants are producing more on less water. This is just barely beginning to be studied, but, already, we’ve got the doomsayers out.
While I THINK (at least I sure hope) there are some real-world upper limits on how far off the deep end the EPA can take this without Congressional action, consider for a moment this sobering and potentially very frightening thought:
Carried to its ultimate and bureaucratically insane conclusion, this absurd finding that CO2 is ”dangerous” has the potential to eventually lead to government regulating, monitoring, and controlling just about EVERY aspect and minute detail of the personal lives of all US citizens.
Never forgot: Freedom never was free; and it won’t continue to exist if a majority are content to leave the government on internal autopilot.
It’s a crisis — accelerating flora growth rates change everything in the biosphere. How can people run things if everything keeps changing? Next thing you know, fauna will respond to increased flora growth and we’ll have more meat than we can eat. Then there will be more people to eat more of the available food. It’s enough to drive control freaks (aka bureaucrats) up the wall.
The average human breathes out CO2 at about 40,000ppmv. Multiply that by 6.5 billion then double every 45 years. I guess there is a problem.
A desensitizing step closer to the public announcement of the bigger depopulation agenda?
“We can’t forecast ecological change. It’s a complicated business,”
Why not just use computer models? I can hardly be more complex than climatic systems.
I am sure the models will show that the Aspen tree will grow to more than 500 meters in 2100. Furthermore, the amount of drift wood from these trees will make the oceans rise another meter by 2100.
/Mikkel
@Purakanui
Grenhousemen routinely run the C02 level at 1,000PPM and as high as 2,000ppm – to benefit plant production.
EM Smith states that this level was as much as 1,000 times greater in the past without ending the world.
I think we should be able to stop the EPA once more… remember the MTBE additive they required – !
Richard111 (22:43:01) :
That made me wonder if there has ever been an honest accounting of the effect that population has on CO2. There were 1.6(ish) billion people in 1900, and there are now 6.1(ish) billion. That is four times as much CO2 being exhaled. Where does it all go?
The action of the EPA is constitutional. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant in the Massachusetts vs. EPA decision of 2007.
The government is legislatively making Nature subject the government’s rules and regulations.
We will live in a Utopian Camelot of government specified temperature, controlled sea level, a government standardized CO2 concentration and lots of Arctic ice for the Polar Bear playground.
The EPA is bringing a new meaning to the term “oxygen thieves.” Also reported in the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126013960013179181.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I see Barrie Harrop is hyperventilating there again… doesn’t he realise that will produce more CO2???
The museum of natural history of Helsinki features a note on the Devon (?) period: “Falling CO2 levels forced plants to develop more efficient methods of assimilating CO2 and they started sprouting LEAVES.”
As a retired GP in his 90th year I am astonished that the medical profession has swallowed the idea that CO2 is a poison. The BMJ and Lancet promote this nonsense. Less than 30 years ago we denied that peptic ulcer could be due to a bacillus. It took Australian doctors to prove us wrong, and ten or more years for us to accept that. They deserved their Nobel Prize in this century for their determination in the face of hostility.
Now Joanne Nova is leading the way in concentrating on the central ‘diagnosis’ that CO2 is the culprit. She deserves all the support she is now receiving.
Alick Dowling
Barrie Harrop is a sanctimonious turd. He’s quite the ‘green energy exec’ ain’t he?
Apparently business is so good he has endless tracts of time to spend online spewing nonsense…..i wonder what the board of directors think of his online antics….