Dr. Patrick Moore, who was one of the original founders of Greenpeace who left the organization in disgust of their current political zealotry, and Greenpeace is now trying to have him erased from history for daring to do that. He has now produced this interesting video in conjunction with with Prager University that is sure to put some people into conniption fits.
Global Warming activists will tell you that CO2 is bad and dangerous. The EPA has even classified it as a pollutant. But is it? Patrick Moore provides some surprising facts about the benefits of CO2 that you won’t hear in the current debate.
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Good to see another honest environmentalist!
Jim I think that most folk think of themselves as environmentalist and conservators of nature. Heck it’s the way people are hustled into recycling; to do their little part. It’s the reason all the “cute” pictures of wildlife are so manifestly popular. What is required is rationality in these areas. Everyone supports “sustainable” harvesting in the oceans. Everyone thinks that our world should be as pollution free as we can make it. That does not mean we should return every wild area to some pristine ideal before the expansion of modern man. That is simply impossible unless you eliminate mankind from the environment. As you well know there are a number of “ecologists” who are unabashed about advocating a reduction of human population levels to one billion. Listen to guys like Ehrlich and that will be achieved either by some form of enlightened “humane” totalitarian world government or catastrophe. If this could be well understood by “environmentalists” we would be better off.
In your area of the world there is the goofy proposition that millions of area feet of water need to be released to the sea rather than the California Aqueduct to protect a few hundred 2 inch long smelt. No one needs to run roughshod over vanishing species but then again if sensible measures to care for our own species demands it then that is the way nature has always taken care of that sort of conflict.
Hear, hear, fossilsage! I have yet to hear a satisfactory answer to the question Why must absolutely every species be saved from extinction, without a valid, scientific reason? Corollary: Why is every single species that goes extinct a teeth-gnashing tragedy and indictment of humanity?
First, saving every species from extinction will nilly is AGAINST the natural order of things. 99.9% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct. It is the fate of species.
Second, we are in a drought in California. No I don’t want to torture baby seals or unnecessarily drive any species over the edge. But what is a valid, non-emotional reason that the Delta smelt matters? (And Biodiversity is not a scientific discipline. It is barely a definable word.)
There’s a little bit of truth to the saying that if you want to be saved from extinction, get a better PR Rep, or rent a Panda suit. Sometimes there are conflicts between human needs and the needs of a bait fish. I think it is moral to choose humanity.
Absolutely wonderful whenever a recognized expert publicly opposes dogma that is masquerading as science. Thank you Dr. Moore.
Patrick Moore, B.Sc. (Hons) Forest Biology, University of British Columbia (1969); Ph.D. Ecology (Thesis: “The Administration of Pollution Control in British Columbia: a Focus on the Mining Industry“), Institute of Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia (1972); Ford Foundation Fellowship (1969-1972); Vice-President, Pacific Salmon Society (1969-1972); Director, Western Canada Chapter, Sierra Club (1971-1973); Co-Founder, Greenpeace (1971-1986); Member, Board of Directors, British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association (1984-1991); Founder and President, Quatsino Seafarms Ltd. (1984-1991); President, British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association (1986-1989); Member, Board of Directors, British Columbia Aquaculture Research and Development Association (1990-1993); Member, Aquaculture Advisory Council, British Columbia Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries (1990-1993); Founder and Chairman, British Columbia, Carbon Project (1990-1994); Appointment, British Columbia Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (1990-1994); Consultant, British Columbia Hazardous Waste Management Corporation (1991-1992); Member, Power Generation Working Group, Greater Vancouver Regional District (1992); Member, Economic Development and Environment Committee of the Vancouver Board of Trade (1992-1994); Consultant, Canadian Pulp and Paper Association (1992-1996); Consultant, Westcoast Energy and British Columbia Gas (1993-1994); Director, Architectural Institute of British Columbia (1995-1996); Director and Vice-President, Environment and Government Affairs, Waterfurnace International (1995-1998); Advisor, Canadian Mining Association (1996); Honorary Doctorate of Sciences, North Carolina State University (2005); Founding Co-Chair, Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (2006-2013); National Award of Nuclear Science and History, National Atomic Museum Foundation (2009); Speaks Truth To Power Award, EarthFree Institute (2014); Member, Board of Directors, Forest Alliance of British Columbia (1991-Present); Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Greenspirit (1991-Present); Chair, Ecology, Energy, and Prosperity Program, Frontier Centre for Public Policy (2014-Present)
Patrick Moore, B.S ….
Yep. Lots of government-paid BS there. So, he was paid as a “consultant” for hazardous waste disposal and the paper industry and the mining industries. Therefore, since he was paid to dispose of hazardous waste, nothing he claims can be correct science or regarded as truth, right? /sarchasm – that gaping whole between a liberal and the truth.
What is your comment supposed to mean?
Luke,
I am a grad. of The University of Texas at Arlington in Electrical Eng. .
Work on the first Nuke plant for Texas Electric Service Company at Granbury Texas.
Navy needed me so off to install high tech of the time in Laos to track NVA and Russian troops hauling arms into S. Vietnam. Used lots of IBM 360’s and other high tech of the time. Came back and worked at General Dynimics research and development in Ft. Worth on the terrian following radar on the F-111, then off to Sandia Lab on still classified high energy mico wave directed things. Then into family buss. farms, ranching and such after a Banking and Finance Degree from TCU Ft. Worth.
Thing is I have a few brain cells and they work.
CO2 makes my cows happy.
My cows feed many people.
CO2 makes my wheat crop bigger and that feeds even more people.
Wind mills are just fine in New Mexico to bring stock water to the surface for my old cows to drink. Its not much good for much else.
The nuke I helped build is still going just fine.
You need to think a bit too.
OK, sounds like you understand statistics and data analysis. If you believe that flooding of our coastal cities will not be a major problem in the near future, please explain figure 4 in this peer-reviewed paper (url below).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014EF000272/pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014EF000272/full#figure-viewer-eft254-fig-0004
Had a look at your scarey figure 4 and found it to be not scarey at all. Consider that the scarey trajectories are for a measly 10 cm and that New York and Newark are subsiding, ther is nothing there that can’t be coped with by engineering.
Robert Austin, You don’t mention the that the data for 20, 30, and 40 cm floods are showing the same exponential increase in NYC (and it looks like the 50 cm data are starting to show the same pattern). Will engineering provide a solution for these kinds of flooding events? If so, how much will it cost? If I owned property on the coast in these cities, I would sell it fast- wouldn’t you? I am sure the insurance companies and lenders are looking at these data too. It will soon be very expensive to by a home in these areas.
Weather phenomena and civil engineering may be interesting discussion topics, but aren’t related to the falsified idea of CAGW.
And it’s already quite expensive to live in NYC. If anything, natural disasters, (Natural. Disasters. Apt phrase.) often drive down property values in the short term.
+1
Reblogged this on Sierra Foothill Commentary and commented:
Since this will never get the recognition it should have in the lame stream press, please pass this to family and friends.
I believe the first sentence still needs work.
Put a period after zealotry. Erase the “and”.
I greatly admire Patrick Moore and agree with almost everything he says, but when pointing out the higher concentrations of CO2 over geological time, I think one should also point out that the Sun is also understood to be increasing in brightness over these time scales.
Canman,
You said:
“…but when pointing out the higher concentrations of CO2 over geological time, I think one should also point out that the Sun is also understood to be increasing in brightness over these time scales.”
Yeah, so?
By what percent do you believe the sun has brightened by, and over what time frame?
Links and sources please.
And how much higher has CO2 been in the past, with no causal link to temperature?
(Graph is posted above for long term CO2 vs temp trends.)
Compare these two figures, and explain how one is relevant to the other.
Please.
Thanks in advance.
There is a vast mountain of historical data strongly implying that CO2 is not linked to the temperature of the Earth. Increasing CO2 has not been shown to lead to higher temps. Not then, not now, and therefore likely not ever.
I’m a lukewarmer and you seem to be on the far end of the skeptic scale. I don’t always agree with Potholer54 (Peter Hadfield), but I do think he makes a good case in this video:
If Moore would’ve mentioned that the Sun has increased in brightness, his critics wouldn’t be able to say he didn’t mention it. All that said, I think Moore makes eminent sense on energy and that Potholer and his ilk are a bunch of economic and engineering illiterates.
Sorry for the playlist. I meant this one (number 27):
Cue a Dana Nuccitelli / Guardian hit-piece on Moore within the week.
Likewise Greg Laden and his ‘Moore is not a co-founder of Greenpeace’.
The Peas need some Stalin-era style help in erasing people I think. I ran into this while doing some research on Francis Drake. Please see second article:
http://www.abcbookworld.com/newspaper_files/newspaper_2004_3.pdf
Sneak preview of new OCO-2 result from their twitter feed:
. Yes it is what it looks like.
https://twitter.com/IamOCO2
This is funny:
What alarmists like Dana Nuccitelli / Guardian want us to believe is that CO2 has eaten from the tree of knowledge and gaining the knowledge of good and evil has gone from innocence to malicious malevolence.
So the right has Satan, the left has CO2 and life goes on regardless as to how many numskulls the human race is capable of creating.
Alx July 28, 2015 at 1:30 pm:
“So the right has Satan”
Nah, the right has the “Progressive”-Commie Pre-Enlightenment Totalitarian Throwbacks. There’s no need for a Supernatural Satan.
Life relentlessly removes CO2 from the atmosphere, by making fossil fuels but mostly by making limestone, until it bounces off a “floor” below 200ppm at which time plants start to die and their CO2 is released. This has happened only two times in earth’s history, during the Carboniferous ice age and during current times (we are in an ice age right now) . So how did CO2 recover last time back to a more normal 1,500ppm during the age of the dinosaurs? Several ways. That ice age ended releasing CO2 from the oceans. Also, fossil fuels and limestone get subducted and belched out by volcanoes. Limestone also weathers releasing CO2. But we were stuck in the CO2 basement and would have stayed there for millions of years if not for the burning of fossil fuels.
and those that wail and rail about it have no appreciation of how good we all have it
Why is Patrick Moore working with Prager University?
“Prager University is not an accredited academic institution and does not offer certifications or diplomas.”
M. Mann is at Penn State University. Penn State U is an accredited academic institution and it does offer certifications and diplomas. Do you think Penn State U would place this on their Web Site. Are you kidding?
Do you think any University comparable to Penn State would do so? Are you kidding?
Photosynthesis as described by Dr. Patrick More is not a University level course. It is not even a high school level course. Not even a High School would sponsor what Dr. Patrick Moore presented.
Photosynthesis is in 5th-6th grade school curriculum.
See here:
http://www.slideshare.net/MMoiraWhitehouse/photosynthesis-teach
See also what else this “grade school teacher” brings to her students. Just marvelous.
My daughter is a high school science teacher and what she does is add the “physic principles and numerical crunching” to the basic learned in middle school.
Not that I want to denigrate what Dr. Patrick Moore presented. If American citizens and particularly politicians need this presentation from Dr. Moore to understand that CO2 is not carbon and not a pollutant and without CO2 there is not possible life on earth as we know it, after finishing high school education we are in serious trouble.
I just take the presentation by Dr. Moore as a reminder of “what did you learn in school” and I don’t care where it is presented.
“Common core” probably teaches this, but removes the fact that plants absorb and use CO2.
/sarc (i hope)
rd50 July 28, 2015 at 4:06 pm
“If…we are in serious trouble”
Hate to tell you this…….
“If American citizens and particularly politicians need this presentation from Dr. Moore to understand that CO2 is not carbon and not a pollutant and without CO2 there is not possible life on earth as we know it, after finishing high school education we are in serious trouble. ”
Yup, you got that part exactly right.
He does need to say it, and we are in trouble.
The decades long alarmist meme has succeeded in skewing the minds of a great many folks.
Not everyone mind you, but a lot of folks.
People who are not well steeped in science education often have a surprisingly low level of general knowledge, from the point of view of those who actually paid attention and retained what they learned.
Spreading lies for all this time has not helped one little bit.
This was in school way before “Common core”. You can’t teach photosynthesis without CO2. My children (now below/above 50) learned this in school, not university.
I now have grandchildren in 5, 7, 9 an 11 grades.
They all know about photosynthesis and they can explain it to me. Certainly not as their school teachers explained it to them but they come across that CO2 is not a pollutant. Then they add all kind of details. Have fun with grandchildren.
I still have a big garden. My grandchildren are always told by my children, when visiting, how much they worked in it when they were young. My children never tell them that they made quite a bit of money selling the vegetables from the garden on my street corner!
The one in 5th grade will make diagrams and answer and ask questions, she likes this stuff. She belongs to Young Farmers of America (or something like this) and goes to meetings.
Obviously children learn this stuff in school while quite young. How much they retain and for how long they maintain an interest in such is another thing.
It is just disappointing to me that Dr. Moore has to remind us that CO2 is needed. I can understand that yes, not all of us will remember every little thing of “what we learned in school”. Still, if politicians are not willing to consider the absolute need for CO2 we are in serious trouble.
Sir, I appreciate your comments, and commend you for raising what sounds like a fine family of knowledgeable children and grandchildren.
The point that I and some others are making is that there is a concerted disinformation campaign going on, and has been for some time now.
Kids are being fed a load of alarmist tripe dressed all up as factual information.
rd50 you should be quite right but how then do well educated judges and politicians allow themselves to believe that CO2 is a pollutant and a danger to the planet and it should be kept to the unprecedented and almost dangerously low levels of the present era pre industry?
Mods … no comment section for the next article … “So much for the ‘lizards are facing mass extinction due to climate change’ scare…” ????
It’s The Lizard Overlords wot got us into this climate mess in the first place.
/s
It is there now. I could not see it at first either, teapartygeezer.
Went to hear him speak in Perth a while back. He has some interesting things to say on GMO’s too.
Do you live in Perth? I know someone who moved there a few years ago. Large town, is it?
Population just over 2 million. It’s the fastest growing city in Australia, currently the fourth largest but is expected to overtake Brisbane as the third largest by 2030.
Thank you for your excellent work
Thank you for the post… Posted this on Facebook.
Elegant, simply honest, basic science a child could understand. Well done.
Plant lives matter
CO2 lives matter
Anthony, Moore is not a co-founder of Greenpeace. It’s just not true. You should know that. Aren’t the facts sufficient to you?
[your facts are not sufficient to me, and you are most certainly wrong. It’s clear from your twitter feed you are consumed with hating people whom you disagree with -A]
Wow Sara. You should wake up. There are many many pictures of Moore in early Greenpeace days. Of course he looked different then. You do know how time affects living organisms, yes? There are also documents of all sorts. News reports.
Investigate it for yourself. If you then use the same technique to research the issue of CAGW, we’ll be welcoming you back here real soon.
Regards!
Umm, how can Moore be a Greenpeace co-founder, if he first made contact with them one year after the founding? Or is the letter fake? … http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/06/27/who-founded-greenpeace-not-patrick-moore/
Honestly, why put yourself in this position? Just stay to the truth, that he was a member of Greenpeace, not a co-founder.
And for the record, I’m consumed with finding out what’s real and what’s not, and not much else. You must be reading/projecting something into my twitter feed… Not everybody who disagrees with you is an enemy, you know.
Read “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout” Sara. By the way, I was around at the same University and protesting the testing of atomic bombs at Amchitka when the seeds of Greenpeace were planted. Looked at your twitter feed. I see by your language you are of a generation that would not know about the start of Greenpeace and how it has been corrupted. Oh well. Your world, get used to it. Have a nice day.
I am a retired biologist, I wrote the following piece several years ago which was published in the Daily Telegraph letters. I received emails from a member of the European Climate and a Canadian senator asking permission to use it.
IN PRAISE OF CARBON DIOXIDE
I am a biologist with more than 30 years professional experience.
I object to the characterising of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It is an essential component of our atmosphere, without which there would be no life as we know it on our planet. No plants, therefore no food, also all the oxygen in our atmosphere comes as a by-product of photosynthesis. 2CO2 +2H2O → 2CH2O + 2O2. In English, Carbon dioxide plus water goes to carbohydrate plus oxygen.
Carbon dioxide concentration is the critical rate limiting factor in photosynthesis.
It is essential to plant growth, and at higher levels, plants grow bigger and stronger, are more resistant to disease and the damaging effects of pollution, and are more drought tolerant.
The science is well established. At less than 200ppm (parts per million) there is no photosynthesis at all. Above this figure, photosynthesis increases in line with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels up to 1000ppm, which is the optimum. At the present level of about 400ppm, we are comfortably above the minimum, but well below the optimum.
Commercial Glasshouse crop growers add CO2 to the atmosphere up to 1000ppm
For those who wish to check this out, a book has recently been published called ‘The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment’ by Isdo & Isdo. Each of the 55 examples given is backed by many references to peer reviewed papers in mainstream scientific journals.
The association of the word green with low levels of atmospheric CO2 contradicts the basics of plant physiology, and contrary to popular sentiment, more CO2, not less, makes for a greener world.
Fossil fuels are green energy because they produce an essential plant nutrient as a by-product of their combustion.
Hey Mick – thanks for your letter. It’s important that people with experience and training speak up! The metabolism of heterotrophs and autotrophs are dependent on each other and that’s a fact.
Moore’s video is fine, but I don’t see that he presents “surprising facts … that you won’t hear in the current debate.” The facts he presents are familiar to anyone involved in a debate which isn’t simply loony.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
Not losing sight of the fact that CO2 is not causing a climate problem.
That it is, is an unsustainable theory, leaving us with the fact that the IPCC and its servants are creating a destructive civilization scenario.
I am surprised that some people are surprised at the low level of scientific understanding of basic topics such as the plant lifecycle.
Most people are not (in my experience) interested in any science or engineering concepts, they just want the benefits accrued from their use.
It is a common trait of people to assume that others are like yourself.
But everyone is different in outlook, needs and desires.
We only need look at typical politicians and journalists: all with degrees and experience but no engineering or science knowledge and therefore, very susceptible to anyone with a good story to sell.
It has to be admitted that the greens have sold their story very well indeed….
Most politicians where I come from are Lawyers. They enact legislation regardless of science or common sense. Very few have science degrees.
Thanks to Patrick Moore for this excellent video.
No time to read the above comments – my apologies.
Some recent posts on this subject, including a note on icecap.us:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/14/matt-ridley-fossil-fuels-will-save-the-world-really/#comment-1883937
WHL
I have no time to run the numbers, but I do not think we have millions of years left for carbon-based life on Earth.
Over time, CO2 is ~permanently sequestered in carbonate rocks, so concentrations get lower and lower. During an Ice Age, atmospheric CO2 concentrations drop to very low levels due to solution in cold oceans, etc. Below a certain atmospheric CO2 concentration, terrestrial photosynthesis slows and shuts down. I suppose life in the oceans can carry on but terrestrial life is done.
So when will this happen – in the next Ice Age a few thousands years hence, or the one after that ~100,000 years later, or the one after that?
In geologic time, we are talking the blink of an eye before terrestrial life on Earth ceases due to CO2 starvation.
________________________
I wrote the following on this subject, posted on Icecap.us:
On Climate Science, Global Cooling, Ice Ages and Geo-Engineering:
[excerpt]
Furthermore, increased atmospheric CO2 from whatever cause is clearly beneficial to humanity and the environment. Earth’s atmosphere is clearly CO2 deficient and continues to decline over geological time. In fact, atmospheric CO2 at this time is too low, dangerously low for the longer term survival of carbon-based life on Earth.
More Ice Ages, which are inevitable unless geo-engineering can prevent them, will cause atmospheric CO2 concentrations on Earth to decline to the point where photosynthesis slows and ultimately ceases. This would devastate the descendants of most current [terrestrial] life on Earth, which is carbon-based and to which, I suggest, we have a significant moral obligation.
Atmospheric and dissolved oceanic CO2 is the feedstock for all carbon-based life on Earth. More CO2 is better. Within reasonable limits, a lot more CO2 is a lot better.
As a devoted fan of carbon-based life on Earth, I feel it is my duty to advocate on our behalf. To be clear, I am not prejudiced against non-carbon-based life forms, but I really do not know any of them well enough to form an opinion. They could be very nice. 🙂
Best, Allan
The earth recovered from the only other CO2 crash during the Carboniferous ice age (major) back to a healthy 1,500ppm in the age of the dinosaurs. Eventually, we would have too in millions of years. But it would have taken major volcanism (fossil fuels and limestone get subducted) and an to the current ice age (melting of Greenland and Antarctic). These would be major upheavals. How nice that the burring of fossil fuels gives us a healthy CO2 levels without all the drama. We might even get a little mild, beneficial warming out of it.