From the Chicago Field Museum Climate Exhibit: CO2 makes Poison Ivy grow. Yes, but what about the millions of other plants in the biosphere that is booming? What about agriculture? I really resent this sort of one sided presentation foisted on children that won’t know any better.
Watch this YouTube video showing how a Cowpea plant responds to increased CO2 levels. Most any plant will react in much the same way:
And it gets worse.
Kids can now buy Carbon Credits at the museum from the flatlining Chicago Climate Exchange, which Gore and Pachauri are advisers for.
They may as well just throw their money down the toilet as CCX is now in EPIC FAIL mode. Sure, take money from the kids, why not?
The months of flatlining at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) should be a hint to the rest of the world that carbon trading is dead. Time to take it off life support. Even at 10 cents a ton, nobody wants it. At it’s peak in July 2008, it traded for $7.50 per ton of CO2.
Chicago Climate Exchange close on June 30th, 2010 – click for source
See who is on the CCX advisory board here
And there is lot’s more. How ’bout that Malaria Myth?
The Field exhibit promotes the theory that global warming will cause increased
incidence of malaria. Thatʼs a powerful scare story – global warming, then malaria in
Chicago. In the early days of settlement there was a lot of malaria in the Midwest.
According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:
Willis F. Dunbar in “Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State,” writes that the disease “was so prevalent that it was rather unusual to escape it.”
According the Paul Reiter, a malaria expert, malaria was a serious problem in Britain during the very cold period in the 1600ʼs known as the little ice age. Malaria, called ague, was mentioned 13 times in Shakespeareʼs plays.
Experts on malaria and other mosquito borne diseases have been fighting a losing battle with global warming believers. The idea that global warming will promote malaria is too good a scare story to let the facts get in the way. Nine malaria experts published a letter in the June, 2004 Lancet with the title: “Global warming and malaria: a call for accuracy.”
Above: Malaria endemicity in 1900 (a, top) and 2007 (b, middle) by increasing severity category. The difference in endemicity (c, bottom) from 1900 to 2007 indicates worsening malaria in red areas and improvements in blue (Gething et al., 2010).
If you give this issue a moment of thought, this result should be obvious. Of course malaria is not as bad now as it was 100 years ago. Global health interventions have reduced the problem significantly.
We covered it here on WUWT.
Gore, like the Field Museum, still pushes the factual errors associated with this. See here.
You can read all about the Chicago Field Museum Climate Exhibit in a July 5th walk through report (PDF) by Norman Rogers of www.climateviews.com who has now earned a place in my blogroll. Some of the other exhibit photos are similarly stunningly stupid.
h/t to Tom Nelson
Yes but says:
July 18, 2010 at 2:14 am
“[…]Perhaps it might be more complex than you think. Why doesn’t Anthony give us the full story? How simple it is to give is a picture of a plant in a growth chamber.”
“Yes but” forgets to mention the greening of the Sahel and the 30% increase in plant productivity as mentioned by the IPCC AR4. How simple, “yes but”, to give an incomplete picture of things and omitting the facts that disturb your biased worldview.
They missed a good spin. It makes the grass and weeds grow more also, which means having to mow, etc. more often with one of those nasty old co2 belching, gas guzzling, riding mowers, which add even more co2 and increase our dependence on foreign oil and hasten the arrival of peak oil, which will send us all back to the dark ages of plague and constant warfare. It’s a death spiral that must be stopped before it’s too late!!! As Lucy would say: “Aauuuughhh! We’re all gonna die!”
Yes but says:
July 18, 2010 at 2:14 am
Way to miss the point entirely. Anthony put the video up to show that not only will CO2 cause Poison Ivy to grow, but also other plants. He didn’t go into the discussion of protein yields because it wasn’t pertinent to the discussion of making poison ivy and other plants grow. He also referenced malaria. Do you want a detail dissertation on mosquito mating habits in reference to a story on a museum?
That being said, I’m glad to see you believe the “full story” should be told. So, I can expect you’ll be firing a letter or an e-mail to the museum and demand the museum tell the full story in that it won’t just be poison ivy that grows if we have more CO2? When you do, please stay on topic and relevant.
On the available evidence Malaria, like Aids/Hiv, originated in Africa. The similarity does not end there. Both seem to have been acquired by man from Chimps. Neither are restriced to Africa due to temperature. Public health measures essentially eradicated it from the Arctic Circle, Russia, Scandinavia, UK etc.
Jimbo says:
July 18, 2010 at 3:10 am
“The thing about the photosynthesis bit is that how confused will children be? They are being shown that co2 is a toxin while in biology class some of them are being told that for photosynthesis and food crop production to take place CO2 is an essential ingredient. I can’t see how you spin this story to teenagers. […]”
Exposing teenagers to contradictory information makes them less gullible to the point that even severe deltoid exposure can’t harm them.
This allergy connection has been running for quite a while.
For instance,
http://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20080805/global-warming-may-up-allergies-asthma
I’m not sure why they bother with this … after all, since we’re all
going to burn up and melt and freeze and dehydrate and flood
sometime before tomorrow night, why worry about a little itch?
JimB says:
July 18, 2010 at 3:46 am
“I haven’t checked yet…but isn’t there a public comment section on their website?…”
I haven’t found it yet. There’s a place to e-mail the webmaster, but it seems they don’t want input. But I did find the address and phone number.
1400 S. Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60605-2496
312.922.9410
Smokey – hardly peer reviewed references. I’m not “demonising” CO2 – simply the first part of this post is not telling the full story. And then it goes on to suggesting how a plant reacts in a luxury consumption growth chamber is the same as in the field.
Savanna ecosystems are hardly a “small” part of the planet. And protein yield in wheat is hardly a trifling matter.
In terms of balance – I will give you a possible positive – improved transpiration efficiency will likely increase water runoff.
However – the treatment of Co2 fertilisation by sceptics is immature and incomplete. So let’s not have grand standing about the museums lack of disclosure eh?
Indeed Smokey I suggest you yourself get educated to the wider range of material on the subject.
lol, not one….media@fieldmuseum.org, but rather just media@fieldmuseum.org
CO2 addles museum curators.
So, the Malaria parasite is not specific to the tropics and neither is the vector.
University of East London
Distribution of the genus Anopheles in Europe
http://www.uel.ac.uk/mosquito/Anopheles.htm
European Mosquito Bulletin
http://www.uel.ac.uk/mosquito/
http://www.uel.ac.uk/mosquito/winged.htm
Every warmist knows that CO2 only helps bad plants, while strangling good plants.
As for the carbon credits – well the ad might just was well say “your $1 purchase of a carbon offset helps fund Al Gore’s swimming pool and George Soros’s hedge fund.” What more could you ask for?
webmaster@fieldmuseum.org
Your questions and feedback are very important to us and we strive to
address your emails as quickly as possible. Online inquiries are
answered Monday – Friday, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. Due to the high
volume of emails that we receive, we may not be able to answer your
question the same day.
—
Field Museum Webmaster
This was the only email I could find on the website, and the response I got back.
From their website: “Through interactive stations and videos, as well as dioramas conveying the latest research, Climate Change presents evidence that human activity over the past 300 years has dramatically altered the natural world.”
Yes, we evil humans have certainly done things like build cities, invented things to increase productivity, and generally make our lives easier and more enjoyable. Of course that has had some effect on the “natural world” (meaning we’re part of the “unnatural world”, I guess), but saying we have dramatically altered it is quite a stretch. Nothing there about climate, though, so let’s read on:
“You’ll see how the resulting changes affect our planet, causing sea levels to rise, increasing drought and storms, damaging habitats for wildlife, and stressing human societies around the globe.”
Ah, so the supposed changes resulting from our evil activities, resulting in our being able to live longer, healthier, happier and more productive lives, has supposedly caused sea levels to rise, increased drought and storms, and oh, by the way, also damaged wildlife habitats and stressed human societies. They conveniently neglect to mention that sea levels were rising already, and have been since the end of the last ice age some 11,500 years ago. The “increased droughts and storms” is just a flat-out lie, of course. One only needs to look back at history to realize that. Then they pull another Alarmist trick, that of conflating (supposed) damage to wildlife habitats, and, amazingly, “stressed human societies” with climate change. But, “humans are bad”, aren’t they? Oh, wait, it is the developed, more affluent countries which are bad, and which are causing “stressed human societies”, i.e. poor countries.
Affluence is bad, poor is good is the guilt-causing ideology they are pushing. They then, purportedly, show how to assuage that guilt, and also invite the children to becoming little brown-shirted enviro warriors. It just warms the cockles of one’s heart to see.
Not the worst embarrassment to come from Chicago recently, not by a long shot.
@Vorlath
Well, apparently every punk who runs a drug grow-up in Canada has heard that CO2 makes plants grow faster and bigger. A CO2 generator is one of the basic pieces of equipment they have in the houses they buy (and wreck with the moisture etc.), using propane cylinders.
Are there any studies or papers showing an increase in nitrogen deposited in soy-bean fields do to increases in CO2? I’m searching.
Child and small pet munching Venus Flytraps coming soon…. if we continue to give in to our fossil fuel addiction.
[Please re-post to Tips & Notes so Anthony will be sure to see it. ~dbs, mod.]
evanmjones says:
July 18, 2010 at 12:46 am
As a kid, I used to spend summers on an island that is mainly glued together with poison ivy, so I learned early on how to recognize it. Poison ivy is easy to avoid. You just have to remember that it is arranged in 3-leaf clusters. That will steer you clear.
__________________________________
If you are allergic it is easy to spot. I can even recognize it in winter without leaves. lots of root hairs connecting it to the trees and kind of a corkscrew at the tip of the vine.
If you are allergic and have to deal with it, as I do, a very good product to remove it from the skin is Tecnu. I know of nothing else that works as well. If you are mildly allergic you can take Ivy Drops from a doctor to develop immunity…. It never worked for me even when we diluted the product 100 to 1.
And what ever you do DO NOT BURN IT. Do not chop a large vine either especially in spring when the sap is rising. I friend got sprayed with sap when he copped a vine in early spring while doing some clearing. (vines get 3 to 4 inches in diameter around here)
Maurice Strong is a director of the CCX:
http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/content.jsf?id=67
He’s got a ‘distinguished’ past…
TheGoodProfessor: July 18, 2010 at 4:00 am
“They are being shown that co2 is a toxin”
I must have missed this. Have you got an exact source for this wonderful piece of misinformation [?].
Ummmmm — the EPA, maybe? “EPA’s final findings respond to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that GHGs fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants. ” My emphasis.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/08D11A451131BCA585257685005BF252
No… I thought not. There isn’t one, because no-one is actually saying that all CO2 is bad.
Oh, but they *are*. “EPA’s endangerment finding covers emissions of six key greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.” Same source (the EPA announcement) , my emphasis.
Just like most CO2 lovers – when the facts don’t match, just make up some new ones!
Sorry, chum — your side is the one that’s been inventing facts.
BTW, how’d your kiddies do on their “detect the logical fallacy” test? Or did you invent that “fact,” too?
Did anyone else catch Yes But’s inadvertent argument AGAINST CO2 causing poison ivy to grow faster? Dear fellow. If you want to play the game, remember to not add points to the other side. Your basket is down court. But we’ll take your two points.
*must…restrain..”Post Comment Thumb”…until…code…is…closed…*
Pamela Gray: July 18, 2010 at 7:15 am
Did anyone else catch Yes But’s inadvertent argument AGAINST CO2 causing poison ivy to grow faster?
Yup. And fortunately, I refreshed before I became your echo chamber.