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
At last – some sanity…………..
(from the “Sunday Times”, 18 July 2010)
“The American government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November’s leak of hundreds of stolen emails.
The US Department of Energy (DoE) was one of the unit’s main sources of funding for its work assembling a database of global temperatures.
It has supported the CRU financially since 1990 and gives the unit about £131,000 a year on a rolling three-year contract.
This should have been renewed automatically in April, but the department has suspended all payments since May pending a scientific peer review of the unit’s work.
The leaked emails caused a global furore. They appeared to suggest that CRU scientists were using “tricks” to strengthen the case for man-made climate change and suppressing dissent.”
Half of my backyard is poison ivy. It makes a wonderful fence. Must be a lot of CO2 there, huh? I wonder why increased CO2 would increase the concentration of urushiol?
Mr. Tuttle, doesn’t “allergen” effectively equal “poison” when ingested? What would be the difference?
savethesharks says:
July 18, 2010 at 7:46 am
Where is the honor of this museum board and curator to spin lies like this?
….Are they too stupid to realize they are breaching their honor, or is it something more sinister?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
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Chris, Follow the Money. Museums are as bad as Universities, they want grant and other government money.
Remember my comments about the Council on Economic Development who is behind the eradication of the independent American farmer. They are the same group who are behind CAGW and they are the ones giving money to museums, Universities, NGOs and advertising dollars to the media.
For example notice the Ged Davis, Climategate e-mail Shell Oil, IPCC, UN sustainability, Agenda 21 connection click
Ged Davis [says]
“Ged Davis is the global energy assessment co-president at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international research organization conducting inter-disciplinary scientific studies on environmental, economic, technological, and social issues in the context of human dimensions of global change. Until March 2007 he was managing director of the World Economic Forum, responsible for global research, scenario projects, and the design of the annual Forum meeting at Davos, which brings together 2,400 corporate, government, and non-profit leaders to shape the global agenda. Before joining the Forum, Ged spent 30 years with Royal Dutch/Shell, which he joined in 1972. Most recently, he was the vice-president of global business environment for Shell International in London, and head of Shell’s scenario planning team. Ged is a member of the InterAcademy Council Panel on “Transitions to Sustainable Energy”, a director of Low Carbon Accelerator Limited, a governor of the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa and a member of the INDEX Design Awards Jury. He has led a large number of scenario projects during his career, including the multi-year, multi-stakeholder scenarios on the future of sustainability for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and was facilitator of the last IPCC emissions scenarios.”
The Maurice Strong, Oil, World Bank, UN, Global Governance, Club of Rome…. of course is a classic example.
Now we know how to feed the hungry of the world: By fighting against those who want decrease the amount of atmospheric CO2, which is beneficial for crops and it is the greenest gas ever, as the above video clip shows conclusively.
Some estimates of young seafloor volcanoes exceed a million…
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=03
Just an fyi for our buddy, Gates
Periodic climate cooling enhanced natural disasters and wars in China during AD 10–1900
Abstract
Recent studies have linked climatic and social instabilities in ancient China; the underlying causal mechanisms have, however, often not been quantitatively assessed. Here, using historical records and palaeoclimatic reconstructions during AD 10–1900, we demonstrate that war frequency, price of rice, locust plague, drought frequency, flood frequency and temperature in China show two predominant periodic bands around 160 and 320 years
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/07/13/rspb.2010.0890.full
1. AbstractFree
2. » Full TextFree
3. Full Text (PDF)Free
4. Data Supplement
It would be fun to see the scam of charging children 10 times the actual price of carbon offsets on Fox or Wall Street Journal. If they’re paying a buck, they should get 10 credits. Taking advantage of kids who don’t know the market price is evil.
savethesharks says:
July 18, 2010 at 8:38 am
“… where English Ivy has taken over…”
Try not to be so hard on ‘English Ivy’ – alas, I knew her well…..
Seriously, I find the stuff gorgeous, especially when seen in this form:
http://mpm22bprocess.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/ivywall.jpg
Well, did you take the ‘I’-test?
:-]
HAH! Welcome to my sweet home, Chicago, ladies and gents! Field Museum has long had a very liberal bent, as do all Chicago museums, so this doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Pity, as the place does have some outstanding exhibits including Egyptian mummies (to be perfectly PC, the museum should repatriate these stolen remains to their rightful owners in Egypt!), great dinosaur skeletons etc.
Bad science – CO2 helps all plants grow, and this has been used by greenhouses to increase yields for ages. Please see: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/greenhouse_veg/topics/gtp_pages/co2.html
I don’t go there much, so I haven’t seen all the climate change BS, but I bet this is mentioned at the Museum of Science & Industry, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium etc. AGW is like a fungus that you cannot get rid of….
R. Gates: July 18, 2010 at 8:06 am
Not that those things might not happen, but predicting them with so many other factors involved leaves the world of science and crosses over into politics.
Congratulations. That’s CAGW in a nutshell.
DAV: July 18, 2010 at 9:26 am
I wonder why increased CO2 would increase the concentration of urushiol?
It wouldn’t, but the overall amount would increase as the plant got larger.
Mr. Tuttle, doesn’t “allergen” effectively equal “poison” when ingested? What would be the difference?
Not much to the person who was allergic. So let me pose this: Lactose is a *food* component for most of us, but there are a lot of people who are lactose intolerant — lactose is an allergen to them. Does that mean we should call lactose a poison?
How about those folks who are *not* allergic to urushiol in childhood, but become sensitized to it in later years? “Allergen” is more appropriate — and when you get right down to it, *anything* we ingest can be poisonous if it’s in sufficient quantity.
Ya gotta love semantics…
hunter says:
July 18, 2010 at 9:08 am
R. Gates,
And yes, when and if ocean acidification actually occurs, I am sure it will be detected.
As of now, it is pure pie in the sky.
As for Arctic ice, how far back can you prove there have been no fluctuations like the current cycle of summer ice?
__________________________
Now I realize that the downward trend in Arctic Sea ice and the increased ocean acidity are the two things that skeptics must rail against because they are pretty much in your face measurable events (both predicted by AGW models) and of course we can add to that the general rise in global temperatures and a cooling stratosphere as the two other events long predicted by AGW. So right now, AGW has a pretty good track record to my only 25% skeptical way of thinking. I would love to hear other explanations for these events, and if you say “some other natural variability” then great…what is that mechanism exactly? The 40% rise in CO2 since the 1700’s is the most simple and elegant explanation…with a mechanism and the physics well understood.
But if the above 4 events are indeed happening (and I obviously believe they are) and the cause is indeed increased CO2, it is a big leap (and one that I’m not willing to take) to say all these changes are catastrophic. CO2 remains the simplest explanation and Occam’s Razor would demand that I stay with this explanation until something else even more simple comes along to displace it.
BTW, here’s a great article on the general increase in ocean pH, and some other little nuggets of information. Ocean acidity discussion is on page 9.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/indicators/pdfs/CI-oceans.pdf
Ed Murphy says:
July 18, 2010 at 9:45 am
Some estimates of young seafloor volcanoes exceed a million…
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=03
Just an fyi for our buddy, Gates
_________________
Thanks Ed, I’m glad you think of me as your “buddy”, for I have a complete positive regard for everyone on WUWT. There’s no better place for me to get in touch with the very best of true scientific skeptical thinking, and even the occasional political ranting doesn’t bother me that much. As we all know, Anthony’s service to the world of true scientific discourse and debate is unparalleled. The very fact that we get PhD’s on both sides of the AGW issue to post here is testimony to that.
I know my 75% “warmist” slant bothers a few here, but that’s where my 25+ years of studying this issue has led me. Thanks for the info on volcanoes. I’ve longed been fascinated by them and certainly we know that periods of increased volcanic activity has altered the climate in the past, and probably will in the future. If there was some evidence that natural volcanoes had become more active during the past 3 centuries during which the “human volcano” of fossil fuel burning had become so active, that would be interesting to note.
How to bring down kids at a museum by bringing up the subject of poison ivy. How dreary.
Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is more fun for kids than the Field Museum.
The picture of the children being tasked to contribute their ideas as to how to “Tackle Climate Change” was particularly disturbing. This is a pretty standard brain washing technique. It is used by cults. It is a form of inductive learning where praise and acceptance comes from how well the victim internalises the veracity of what has just been presented. Just think about the steps these children are going through to complete their task. First they have to accept that the whole narrative is valid, at least for a while, then they need to integrate that belief into their world view so that they can think about it, then they need to personalize it n order to concoct a “solution”. This is how true believers are made.
Even museums have understood how things work today. Any alternative exhibition pertaining to real science was not to be funded. Only official government approved science can be funded with your hard earned money.
Brian W says:
July 18, 2010 at 8:57 am
Yes but (July 18, 2010 at 2:14am)
Are you aware that no life is possible without Co2? Every bit of food you eat comes from Co2. Without it no life is possible including yours….
2. A larger plant can store more water thereby increasing its “hardiness” by allowing it to survive longer under drought like conditions. This is what is observed and your point is meaningless since all plants die without water.
_____________________________________________________
Nice comment but CO2 allows plants to be more drought tolerant because the plants do not lose as much water through the stomata. Stomata close in response to higher concentrations of CO2. Stomata form a crucial interface between the plant and the atmosphere and are essential to the control of water balance in plants.
Cannabis responds avidly to increased CO2.
(This would explain a few things.)
The Dutch high-intensity hydroponic growers of weed will push in as much as 1500ppm. At which level one can reportedly stand in the greenhouse, shut down the exhaust fans for a minute, and quite literally hear the plants creaking with growth.
Please note that I’m not proposing to enlist the stoner community as political allies. Their reliability in getting to the polls isn’t very high, for some reason. Wait, what?
Curiousgeorge says:
July 18, 2010 at 9:07 am
…..We are hog-tied by tens of thousands of laws, regulations, taxes, and various control mechanisms that effectively preclude any meaningful resistance, and there are many more on the way.
Anyway, what would you propose be done to remedy the situation(s)? And if I can borrow a phrase: “All options are on the table.”
EDUCATION!
I use the food safety/independent farmer information and the information about Fractional Reserve Banking and the Central Bankers control of our economies to open peoples eyes. I do not care if the person is Conservative or Progressive, neither likes the “banksters” or “corporatism” once they see what it is. Once a person is thinking they can then see CAGW is just more of the same. Heck that is how I ended up here. I started with farming regulation then moved to the Federal Reserve and finally to this blog.
In the words of Henry Kissenger: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people; control money and you control the world.”
Does it work? Actually yes. A bunch of farmers here in the USA managed to kill the National Animal Id program and the food safety bill HR 875. Information passed to one of the cosponsors of the bill HR 875 had her withdraw support. Unfortunately you kill one and half a dozen more spring up. Sighhhh
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips, (1811-1884)
Carbon Dioxide makes all plants grow bigger, better, cheaper. For example, marijuana. Using CO2 and grow lights is a cottage industry in parts of Colorado (and elsewhere). I just Googled “marijuana carbon dioxide” and got 380,000 “hits”.
cheers,
Dr. Richard Keen
So how will our children turn out as adults when they realise they have been so systematically lied to, deceived and not to mention, terrorised by the very people they thought they could trust?
R. Gates says:
July 18, 2010 at 8:06 am
Nice post. Very informative. Hence why I currently am not too focused on the side effects of AGW, but maintain my focus on looking at the evidence for it being a real phenomenon.
Your quest may be along the lines of Dark Warming/Dark Cooling, as a climatological version of the Great Cosmological Argument.
The latter has been going on for about 2000 years.
Neither subject is going to ever have it’s cake and eat it too.
@ur momisugly Gail Combs says:
July 18, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Gail, I don’t disagree that education is important – it is. But it’s only effective if properly applied.
Oxygon, water and food make childrapers, drugdealers, murderers, dictators, cannibals and all other criminals grow up. So let’s spoil all potable water, destroy all farmland and absorb all oxygen in volcanic rock to make the world safer!
PS to Gail:
Btw, we tried the goat thing here a few years ago. Didn’t work out too well. They kept eating the wife’s decorative plantings. 🙂