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
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R. Gates: July 18, 2010 at 11:19 am
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)
Ummmm — *what* downward trend in Arctic sea ice?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/18/sea-ice-news-14/
The *lowest* melt rate in JAXA record is a downward trend?
Katabasis: July 18, 2010 at 12:51 pm
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?
At the very least, they’ll be skeptics…
R. Gates says @11:19 am:
“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.”
Mr Gates completely misunderstands Occam’s Razor. He has it backward. Adding an entity such as CO2 to his explanation makes the explanation more complex, not less.
William of Ockham stated that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” This is formalized as: “Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”
CO2 is an unnecessary entity that was tacked on to the long-accepted theory of natural climate variability, which has been the accepted theory of observed climate events going back well before the industrial revolution. Everything observed today has occurred many times in the past, and the geologic record clearly shows that the current climate is almost perfect for humans. About one more degree of warmth would be perfect.
Occam’s Razor says: take out the CO2! It is not necessary to explain anything in the current climate; Arctic/Antarctic ice cover, heat waves, cold snaps, droughts, typhoons, or two-headed frogs. Natural variability completely explains everything that is being observed. Adding another extraneous variable violates Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s Razor is related to the scientific term “parsimony”: the principle that states that the simplest explanation that explains the greatest number of observations is preferred to more complex explanations. Adding CO2 makes the explanation more complex, and thus more scientifically questionable.
The climate has always varied, and to a much greater extent than today. That is the simplest explanation of what is being observed. Adding another unnecessary entity like CO2 only confuses the issue. It is a deliberate smoke screen intended to hide the rape of the taxpayer by the corrupt climate establishment. Throw out the CO2 argument, and nothing changes. Natural variability still completely explains the observed climate.
Gail Coombs (July 18, 2010 at 12:08pm)
Thanks for the info and the reference! Stomatal closure can be observed using a remote controlled light microscope system.
It almost drives me insane every time I see such appeals for cash to offset ones “carbon footprint” as in one of the pictures above. It’s almost Python-esque, such is the absurdity. But when those appeals are aimed at vulnerable and impressionable children then it is not just absurd – it’s evil. The people doing this must believe that “the ends justify the means” – they clearly see it as a nice easy way to guilt people into redistributing their wealth. And that in turn gives them a nice fuzzy feeling inside that they’re supposedly helping a disadvantaged child somewhere in some backward undeveloped country. Socialists.
Cool, Smokey just “smoked” R. Gates. Glad you did it. I don’t even want to start.
Katabasis
July 18, 2010 at 12:51 pm
We have been lied to also. I’m 50. The first time I remember noticing that a teacher was deliberately lying to me was when I was in the 5th grade. Lefties have been targeting children for a very very long time with their insidious propaganda. I had wanted to become a wildlife biologist, but I could not stomach the insistent Marxist indoctrination. I ended up becoming a software engineer because I was able to teach myself.
If only Jonathon Swift was still alive and writing today….
The protein content thing is a great example of desperately searching for a bad side for something almost completely good and then determinedly only talking about that to the exclusion of all else. The effects of CO_2 on crops are well understood because many commercial greenhouses use CO_2 to enhance production. Take note of that – commercial greenhouses uses it, and it enhances production! Overall yields including protein yields are up considerably in a CO_2 rich environment. But when the plants grow faster protein DENSITY in the plants can in some cases be slightly lower. It is a very small marginal difference – hard to measure. It is basically a dilution effect due to the rest of the plant growing faster and being slightly more robust.
The thing is that commercial greenhouses use CO_2 concentrations massively higher than anything we are ever likely to see in the atmosphere. And the effect being talked about even in that case is almost unmeasurable and has no impact on the use of the plants as food. The bottom line is that you just get a little more fibre with your protein, which some people think is actually a good thing.
Smokey says:
July 18, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Well said! By the same token, some people put God in the equation, and this really complicates things up!
It’s all happening at the Chicago Failed Museum!
Gore’s children’s version of “An inconvenient Truth”, and this museum are obvious in their desire to overtake your child’s mind and spirit, and get them to believe in things which aren’t true.
The British court made the ruling that British schools couldn’t show Gore’s movie without providing the mandated list of caveats about the movie.
There should be a court mandated caveat printout for kids and parents before entering that brainwash location known otherwise as a museum, a supposed place of fact not fiction.
>> Smokey says:
July 18, 2010 at 2:00 pm
R. Gates says @11:19 am:
“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.”
Mr Gates completely misunderstands Occam’s Razor. He has it backward. Adding an entity such as CO2 to his explanation makes the explanation more complex, not less. <<
In fairness to R Gates, the absorption of IR by CO2 is well-understood physics, so including it into the climate is not 'adding' something. What is adding something is proposing a positive feedback mechanism to make CO2 much more powerful than basic theory states.
In any case, the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on the pH of the ocean is insignificant, and the opening of the Arctic to sea travel is only a negative if Russia decided to invade Canada (or vice-versa). The whole CAGW religion is based on insignificant changes within the error in measurement (does anyone actually believe we REALLY know within 2 degrees what temperature of the entire planet was in 1880)?
I first realized that people are sheeple and it didn’t matter whether they were scientists or not, they would believe “authority” before they believed their ‘lying eyes.’ I was at Camp Hancock, science camp for youngsters in the late 70’s and early 80’s and we were split into four groups, archeologists, paleontologists, biologists and naturalists. I was the only kid from the area and the rest were mostly Portland kids. So when I was told that a particular plant was “endangered,” I was naturally curious how such a thing could be when I happened to have hiked vast areas of that country and saw clearly THAT plant on EVERY hillside in infinite profusion. And I knew the plants of the country very well, having memorized genus and species of hundreds of the common ones encountered in eastern Oregon, so I wasn’t confusing that plant with another. So I asked the scientist ‘teaching’ us how such an extremely common, though lovely, plant could ever, in any way shape of form be considered “endangered.” The answer he gave was ludicrous. He said that scientists had studied it and their complex and deep understanding of current and future ‘pressures’ on the plant’s ecosystem had lead them to label this plant as “endangered” and he trusted them because they were the experts, not I. So I replied back, “So the scientists don’t care about how common a plant is before they label it “endangered,” do I have that correct? Instead, they somehow think they have the ability to predict the future of the environment that sustains that plant? Is that right? Wow. So even though this plant is thriving over millions and millions of acres, that doesn’t matter if a scientist thinks, for whatever reason, those millions of acres will change in some dramatic fashion and so therefore this extremely common plant is now “endangered?” Ha ha ha ha ha!”
On that day I became a skeptic.
@ur momisugly Yes but (July 18, 2010 at 2:14 am) lists 5 reasons why CO2 is bad news. Why no mention of catastrophic global warming, Yes but? Forgotten the mad fundamentalist AGW meme, Yes but? You know, the reason – the only reason – why economies are supposed to stump up with trillions so we don’t fry? Enough of your garbage already.
How odd. This WUWT story is sticking at result no 97 when I Google for
“Chicago Field Museum” (including the quotes). Usually I would expect it to move rapidly to the first page. Perhaps nobody is doing that search!
Bank loans enforced via contracts … futures contracts via bids and sales on the open commodities markets; are you conflating more than usual NWO/Big-Bankster connections? This gets old Gail, and works to discredit actual, meaningful material you sometimes do post …
.
Its a similar story in Perth – we have SciTech, the science museum here in WA – they’re advertising on TV all the time about ‘finding out about climate change’ (featuring a ‘yoof’ standing on one leg on a rapidly melting iceberg, telling a penguin there’s no room) and ‘how you can help’ – blah blah.
They’re peddling this crap to kids and school tours and even have a feature on their website http://www.scitech.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=729&Itemid=26
Maybe we should go there and ask them to show us something concrete, like evidence, rather than just the results of model and supposition.
FTM: “When nobody is around the motion detectors turn off the lights and save electricity, right? If you’ve been to the Field Museum you know that some of the display cases are huge and have hundreds of exhibits, so you’re standing there looking at the exhibits when suddenly the lights go out.”
Getting OT, but personal experience compels comment. You should see how well this works when the bean counters put motion detectors in the classroom. You just get the kids to settle down and read, and the lights go out….
Replaced with … the “Framework for Animal Disease Traceability” (1). Same goal, slightly different means and some other minor changes …
Killed, no. Alive, in a different form achieving the same result (traceability of foodstuff/animal stock in the foodchain) … no?
(1) Framework for Animal Disease Traceability
.
???
Where do you come with these conclusions, or, maybe more importantly, how do you draw these (sometimes) outlandish inferences?
And, WHAT “Council on Economic Development” would you be referring to; EVERYBODY has a ‘council on economic development’ … Google returns 43,600,000 hits on that term (in 0.53 seconds I might add) …
.
Absolutely disgraceful !
They obviously know that CO2 increases plant growth. This is blatantly and fraudulently misleading children.
Gail Combs says:
July 18, 2010 at 12:25 pm
===================================
Ironically, the producers that brought us “An Inconvenient Truth” [ugh] actually did some good and produced “Food Inc.”
I follow everything you say–and agree 100%–about the assault on the independent farmer.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey says:
July 18, 2010 at 2:00 pm
@R. Gates 11:19 am:
===========================================
Excellent post, Smokey….and as usual, R slips away like an eel through the fishnet when he is outmatched, out of his league, and “out-logic’d”.
No response to his half-truths, because he knows in a formal debate, with such “tricks”…he would never win.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Well what an amazingly ecophysiologically ignorant set of comments. Increased atmospheric CO2 will have unpredictable impacts on many species – what we have here is primary school level sceptic trivialisation.
Savanna woodlands are incredibly important biomes across the world for beef cattle production and native animals. Woodland thickening or shrub encroachment is well demonstrated across southern Africa, the southern USA and Australia at least. To date from changes in fire regime and grazing but being added to each day by CO2 fertilisation of C3 natural woody species of trees and shrubs. So CO2 lovers want to choke out productive savannas with native woody weeds? http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/woody-weeds-love-co2/1729857.aspx?storypage=0
FACE experiments in the real world show nothing like our test tubes experiments listed here – and please note the CO2 amounts shown above in the picture. Vastly in excess of current levels. 450 ppm as a control !!! versus 1270 ppm – Come on guys – wise up !
Indeed CO2 will reduce protein yields in wheat – needing more fertiliser. Great new as agricultural inputs hyperinflate (not!).
And there is a great deal of work on increased risk frost injury from increased CO2 as well. At least get yourself up to date with a robust discussion of the issues on an evidence-based science site.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-is-Good-for-Plants-Another-Red-Herring-in-the-Climate-Change-Debate.html The comments are most informative with references for those who can’t google.
As for Graham Dick – who said anything about stuffing economies. Is this the old sceptic meme of “I don’t like a possible policy response so ergo the science must be wrong”. That’s logical (not!).
CO2 does make plants grow better – however there is substantial subtlety in the effects. C3 will respond differently to C4 species. And CO2 is not Jack’s Beanstalk – there is a thing called Liebig’s Law of the Minimum. Not enough water and you’re nowhere.
So a warmer Canadian border with more CO2 – yep probably means more wheat for northern US/Canadian wheat belt. A drier Australia with more CO2 = less wheat. Who wins who loses !? But then again God probably favours WASP American wheat farmers eh? Maybe there’s a conspiracy and the CIA already know that – which is really why CO2 is being allowed to increase uncontrollably. (I read it on the internet! 🙂 ).