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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The world has gone mad.
And I want a limo to get there gawdamit!
Limos are for peasants. The aristos arrive in helicopters.
The EPA needs to declare some minimum acceptable level (MAL) of CO2.
Then they could print on all their regulation sheets:
MAL CO2.
The basis of all life on this planet has now been outlawed. Presumably this meeans that CO2 beer will now have to be banned along with leavened bread and of course animal life itself.You could not make this up….sorry I forgot the IPCC. Enjoy those bubbles this Christmas,they may be your last!
” . . . 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 . . . ”
DOES THIS MEAN THAT I CAN GET A FREE CHRISTMAS BY THE END OF THE WEEK ?
Bruce Cobb: I remain civil on this site when, God knows, its easy for *all* of us on different sides to lose our rag – insulated as we are behind the interwebnets. Let’s try and remember we’re all people behind these comments, and do each other the service of being civil? Fire is potentially dangerous. Water is potentially dangerous. There are laws on both of these, that exist now. A house may potentially get burgled: many people have insurance to cover this, now.
Reed Coray: maybe the example of fire was a bad one. Say water instead. Water in swimming pool: good, for swimming. Bad, for very small children – kills more children than guns in houses do. That’s all I’m trying to say – before we even get onto the question of regulation, I’m just making the simple point that – as you also mention – pretty much anything in nature can be good or bad, depending on the context. Making lots of noise about the EPA banning breathing or starving trees is equivalent to: if some body passes a law enforcing kiddie rails around pools, everyone then starts saying “they’re banning swimming!” It may be effective politically, but it’s just silly. No, they’re not. You can still swim, they’re just attempting to protect against one dangerous aspect of having a pool.
Now – we can get on to an argument about whether regulation is good or bad – in the pool example, whether that’s the state interfering where they shouldn’t – but that’s a different argument. And a quick point on that:
“I think it’s fair to say that an agency that can regulate anything is a form of dictatorship. I believe in this country there would be a consensus (even in the subset of AGW scientists) that the EPA is not and should not be the center of a dictatorship.”
I’d argue you’ve got things a bit backwards here. If you were living in a dictatorship, overwheening regulation would be the least of your worries. You’d be making sure to turn up to the party-sponsored rallies to make sure your face was seen by your neighbours, so you or a family member wasn’t dragged from their bed in the middle of the night and never seen again. A dictatorship, indeed, would be able to pass any law they wanted, but you don’t live in a dictatorship. As can be seen by all the struggles in congress, it takes a huge political struggle to get anything done. You may or may not like who got elected, or the make-up of congress, or any of the other many things that might be wrong with politics generally (leaning towards plutocracy?) – but making comparisons to dictatorship? Hmm.
So we are not living in a dictatorship?
I think you need to put a “yet” in there.
The Copenhagen conference isn’t really about climate change or perhaps, climate change was an excuse to get there or maybe even that the most important concern about Copenhagen is the proposed new regulatory body….
I don’t know how familiar you are with normal treaties but the usual form is that once the necessary number of sovereign states agrees and the treaty is ratified, the various sovereign states then implement the necessary national statutes/laws and implement local enforcement procedures and administer such punishments as are necessary.
This has been the way of it and the main purpose of such treaties is to address global problems, including environmental.
But, instead of following the usual procedures of treaty making they propose to establish a regulatory body that will have the global power to regulate (make laws) and with its own financial powers (to re-distribute wealth, effectively) and its own enforcement powers (policing, prosecuting and administering fines/ prison sentences etc.).
The pattern is one we are now familiar with from the Lisbon Treaty.
The Lisbon treaty started as a common agricultural policy or whatever and Ted Heath took the UK in with a lot of lies and false promises. That has lead to today’s new model parliament with very little democracy left in it and what it becomes will be something we can only imagine.
So the danger at Copenhagen is that we get a global EU style parliament, if not now then very soon.
Curiously, no one has explained why thy need to do it this way rather than the more usual way.
Don’t you find that curious?
But, if Climategate isn’t de-railing the process (and it may even have, by its very threat, encouraged some of the hardball players to come prepared to sign and take their prize now while it is still on offer), and surely it should – politicians should want to say “Well, there are some questions being raised that do need to be answered and we need also to see how this has changed public support, you know, we represent the people, not ourselves here (reports are that US support for AGW has dropped 11 points which must signal to the US President that he is close to losing whatever mandate he had to any action at all) – then the conclusion must be that Global Warming has been an excuse, a plausible justification for doing something people would otherwise not want to do. For some, it may be the chance to make some money and for others, a path to a different social stucture.
Now if we live in democracies, any of us, or what pretend to be them, then surely polticians, honest ones, would want to have the true facts AND the support of the people. When it comes to support rather than an acceptance of AGW, the current proportion of the population supportive of such actions is much lower. Some people accept the AGW scenario but don’t accept that it is as serious as claimed and some, many, think there are more important problems and that there is more value (lives saved) through other uses for the money than climate change.
Blom Bomberg has a nice take on this and in two years of running a survey Climate came 12th or so in a list of things people would rather do with the money.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html
Dan Olner (02:35:57) :
I remain civil on this site when, God knows, its easy for *all* of us on different sides to lose our rag – insulated as we are behind the interwebnets. Let’s try and remember we’re all people behind these comments, and do each other the service of being civil? Fire is potentially dangerous. Water is potentially dangerous. There are laws on both of these, that exist now. A house may potentially get burgled: many people have insurance to cover this, now.
This is just more BS, Dan-O, and you know it. When you make stuff up like saying the EPA “is saying it’s potentially dangerous”, and “They’re saying it’s a greenhouse gas that, in large concentrations, will cause dangerous global warming” you are essentially lying, which is what Alarmists do because the facts are not on their side. You know perfectly well that they did not say that, so stop whining and trying to play the victim card.
Your comparisons of C02 to fire, water, and burglary are complete nonsense, which is just another Alarmist troll tactic. So, just stop.
Bruce Cobb: so, I’m lying when I say the EPA call co2 a greenhouse gas that can cause global warming? OK. Um. Well, here’s the EPA news release –
http://bit.ly/5vCkT4
Interestingly, you could have chosen to argue with me on many points about this. Let me pick some for you: the EPA approach does, in fact, appear to be bypassing democratic oversight, despite the fact its just carrying out a supreme court ruling. Also, why lump GHGs in with ground-level pollution? Overkill much? Or, yes, they don’t use the word ‘potentially’. You’re right. But I wasn’t arguing about that; I just thought all this “EPA banning breathing” stuff seemed a bit over the top.
Instead you were just abusive again. Alarmist troll? Thanks. Would you like another go at being civil? Or would you prefer it if no-one with views different from yourself posted here?
JMANON:
“Global Warming has been an excuse, a plausible justification for doing something people would otherwise not want to do.”
Some interesting points there. Though I don’t agree with you on much of it, the central problem with global or regional political agreements is tricky.
If you take something like the WTO – as one political analyst writes, it’s a ‘mast that politicians can tie themselves to to avoid the siren-like calls of lobby groups.’ That is, a politician can stand up in Parliament or wherever, and when someone says “give us money to keep our factory going” they can reply “sorry, that’d be breaking WTO rules.”
The theory there being – as with Copenhagen – collectively binding ourselves to make everyone better off, though it’ll cost some. Interestingly, very few of the thinktanks now attacking Copenhagen seem to have any problem with the WTO: another form of ‘global dictatorship’ that removes vital economic powers from sovereign states.
One would like to think there’s a happy middle ground, since on some areas, surely international co-operation of the form the WTO has (really quite a small body) is useful. I don’t buy Monckton’s stuff about global communist conspiracies, any more than I buy left-wing views of the WTO as a global capitalist conspiracy. Reality is generally murkier than this, and people generally too incompetent to carry out conspiracy even if they wanted to.
The analogy to house insurance is unpersuasive, because the cost is so high and the threat is so remote. It’s like saying we should live in tree-houses to avoid the threat of a drunken elephant rampage, or put a moat around our houses to deflect a phalanx of army ants.
And it’s unpersuasive because carbon emissions in the Third World are going to continue to rise regardless of what the West does, dwarfing our efforts. And because, even if all humanity stops emitting CO2, it will have only a slight effect on the amount in the air.
Incidentally, I just read on Bloomberg that, thanks to the recession, the US is already halfway to the nearest of its Copenhagen CO2 reduction targets. I’ve also read that emissions in the UK and Japan are down for the same reason as well. And yet, I think, worldwide CO2 levels continue to advance at the same rate as before. (I urge anyone who is more au courant on these matters to post figures and/or links.)
Dan-O: so, I’m lying when I say the EPA call co2 a greenhouse gas that can cause global warming
Well, let’s just check, shall we?
You originally said “they’re saying it’s potentially dangerous. They’re saying it’s a greenhouse gas that, in large concentrations, will cause dangerous global warming (quite a bit different from your statement above, so another example of your dishonesty).
Now, here is what the EPA actually says “climate change is threatening public health and welfare, and it is critical that EPA fulfill its obligation to respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants.”
Either you can’t grasp what the meaning of the word “is” is, or you are lying. So, which is it?
Apparently you don’t get humor, either (another Alarmist troll trait), because the “banning breathing” is, of course an exaggeration. They say that the ability to laugh is the mark of intelligence. That does appear to be the case.
Different views, yes, of course. Dishonesty, no.
I cannot see why anyone would fail to see the global conspiracy, I am not sure the political aim but it is another hit on the middle classes, last time the middle classes were exorcised was by Stalin and Hitler, so we know it will not be good. Ultimately this money and power grab will fail as it is the middle classes that make most of it. Probably it is some form of communism/socialism after all its leaders are very wealthy.
Im new here, is Bruce Cob a warmist troll? the EPA is saying CO2 is causing global warming and need legislation to control. It is alarming me hugely, it is a lie and fraud, as any sane/honest human can see.
I am no scientist (can I have a cushy job in political climate research?) but if CO2 was a problem in the atmosphere then there would be a tumultuous outcry against catalytic converters (modern cars will pass emission tests in the UK without one) loose them and we could go back to real petrol and better fuel consumption, plus less CO2. Also why is there no outcry against chinese goods, the enviromental impact of chinese manufacture is massive but not a peep.
It is a logical impossibility that CO2 is effecting health in any remote way.
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a natural part of Earth’s Atmosphere (NASA)
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen from 0.028% to 0.038% (380ppm) over the past 100 years (IPCC)
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is not toxic until 5% (50,000ppm) concentration (Source)
– Any detrimental effects of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) including chronic exposure to 3% (30,000ppm) are reversible (Source)
Bruce Cobb, thanks, I really feel like we’ve had a good ol’ open chat about stuff here. You’ve really renewed my faith in human nature. Alarmist, troll, and now stupid to boot? Cheers. Are you this unpleasant to people you meet in person, or do you save it for the internet?
Let the Climate Change Alarmists (Al Gore…he invented it) and the EPA show us their leadership and hold their breaths. Problem solved.