It seems Dr. Richard Betts has penned a guest post for the tabloid climatology website known as “Carbon Brief” titled Understanding CO2 fertilisation and climate change. This looks to be a response to the recent NASA study that we covered here on WUWT titled: Inconvenient Study: CO2 fertilization greening the earth. I suspect the alarmists camp is taking some hits over the NASA study from people who are essentially saying “why wasn’t this widely reported along with all the gloom and doom you have been purveying”?
It seems Betts saw the need to embellish what we already know:
The speeding-up of photosynthesis – known as CO2 fertilisation – is well-known to be an important consequence of higher CO2 concentrations, along with increased water use efficiency. Under higher CO2, plants do not lose so much water through their leaves, so can be less impacted by drier conditions.But while the general principles of CO2 fertilisation are known, there is still much to learn about how these processes will operate under future conditions that have not yet been experienced.
Ah, there’s the rub, it’s the old “models and the future” argument that Betts is framing there, but that’s another argument.
On Twitter, Steve McIntyre noted this part of Betts essay:
Despite claims to the contrary, the conclusions of the IPCC take CO2 fertilisation properly into account in the assessment of climate change feedbacks involving the carbon cycle, and in the assessment of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems. They are also starting to account for this in the knock-on consequences for water resources, but that is more cutting-edge science and less advanced.
He’s having none of that, and called out Betts (citing the IPCC WG2 passage above with a screen cap) on Twitter and Betts replied:
@ClimateAudit Nope. CO2 fertilization & greening is in SPM, TS, Ch4 exec summary, many sections in Ch.4, cross-chapter box VW, Ch 18 ES etc
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 2, 2016
McIntyre retorted:
@richardabetts Did you actually look at "CO2 fertilisation" in SPM.2 Table 1? LOL. ROFLOL. WG2 much worse than we thought.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) May 2, 2016
@ClimateAudit Actually I see you are mostly confusing the ocean acidification and OC2 fertilization icons.
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 2, 2016
@richardabetts let's start at begin. U said WG2 SPM & TS reported CO2 fertil'n effect on green. Where? Pls provide exact reference.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) May 2, 2016
@ClimateAudit I actually said CO2 fertilization AND greening, cos you'd said "greening downplayed" whilst citing me on CO2 fertilization.
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 2, 2016
@ClimateAudit And as we have discussed, CO2 fertilization is in Assessment Box SPM 2 Table (p24), and greening is in Table SPM 2 (p30 & 31)
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 2, 2016
@richardabetts My point remains unrebutted. WG2 failed to report the astonishing greening phenomenon. its drought porn was misleading,
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) May 3, 2016
@ClimateAudit I could go on, but I have work to do!
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) May 3, 2016
And then, work or not like the famous XKCD comic “Duty Calls” he comes back, But Steve has already left the building thinking Betts really did have work to do and ended the conversation:
Correction and Note: in the way Twitter displayed these to me, it looked as if they were AFTER Betts has signed off, and the timestamps get reduced to 3h (3 hours ago) rather than the exact time of each Tweet. In the screencap below, it appears just as Twitter presented it to me, but it’s wrong. The Tweets after he says “”but I have work to do” actually came before that Tweet.
So, while Twitter presented it incorrectly, my interpretation followed that presentation and was wrong. The only way to be sure is to click through each tweet and get each timestamp.
I regret the interpretation error, and thanks to Richard Betts for pointing it out.
This just goes to show that Twitter really isn’t a very good medium for discussion and this sort of problem with Twitter timestamps has caused lots of trouble before. Now that I know about it, I’ll be more careful in referencing Twitter timelines in the future, as I’m sure readers will as well. – Anthony
johnsut1 on May 3, 2016 at 6:27 am is right. The major premise of this post is wrong.
I told Betts a long time ago just to stop with the catastrophism. You know, we could all get along, as ultimately we will, when catastrophes never happen.
The climate propagandists are already trying to call catastrophism a construct of the skeptics. They are bargaining for their livelihoods and their reputations, and very weakly.
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The problem is that their past catastrophic predictions are indelible, and public. And coming back to bite them hard.
“bite them hard”
tastes like chicken
I’ve also long been amused that Bill Clinton once called CO2 “plant food”, but only once. Since then, he’s shaddaped. I think he couldn’t resist the dig at Al Gore.
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video is here:
https://reddogreport.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/video-bill-clinton-disagrees-with-al-gore-carbon-dioxide-is-plant-food-not-a-toxin/
Oh, boy, thanks; I’d heard about this but not seen it.
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But still no mention of C3 and C4 plant differences. You cannot talk about plant water requirements, if you do not specify which plant type. Increasing CO2 will have much less of an effect on C4 types.
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“C4 plants are those which photosynthesize following the mechanism called C4 Photosynthesis. They are found only in the angiosperms with about 8,000 members in 17 families (see list below), equivalent to about 3% of all land plants.”
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http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cropsreview.com%2Fc4-plants.html
Oh, and lots of weeds are C4 as well.
True, but not no effect. Maise is C4, and at 750ppm does about 12% better in greenhouse experiments. Less than half of typical for C3. Most food crops except maize, sugarcane, sorghum and millet are C3 including rice, wheat, soy, potatoes, pulses, all fruits and vegetables. Many interesting details in essay Carbon Pollution including experimental yield curves by ppm by crop for 10 major crops. All trees are C3. Phytoplankton are C3. C4 are about 15% of terrestrial plant species.
Especially in dry-land farming.
I’ve read that on wind free days, corn will often stop growing towards the middle of the day, as the CO2 levels in the fields have dropped to low for continued photosynthesis.
I posted yesterday on the effects of CO2 on a few Australian Trees, oh, and coffee. https://pindanpost.com/2016/05/03/forests-loving-more-co2/
Mainly because I am in tree planting mode to shame the Green Blob.
ristvan, the link I gave showed a very different number, (3% vs 15%) ?
I recall Richard Betts working with Dr Tol on economic impacts of rising CO2. If I remember correctly Dr Tol did predict initial benefits of rising CO2. Maybe Increased Plant growth was one of those benefits
Tol will eventually find no upper limit to the benefits of warming and greening. It’s too bad we haven’t the resources to warm and green even more than we will.
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Mebbe Nature existing outside of computer models?
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Well, it took them two IPCC reports to discover that big ball of yellow gas in the sky.
The lead authors of the WG2 Chapters of course knew the drought porn of WG2 was intentionally misleading by omission. They of course knew about CO2 fertilization effects. But they probably didn’t didn’t figure they’d be so strong so soon (the fertilization effect and its reporting) so that they could get away with the misleading SPM statements. Betts is just in spin cycle.
Will there be an IPCC AR6 now?
Richard Betts says ” WG2 Ch4 section 4.3.2.2 page 293 “high confidence that net terrestrial ecosystem productivity at global scale has increased” ”
This is, I think, the point Steve Mc is making. It’s in there, buried, underplayed, on page 293.
But take a look at the headlines in the WG2 SPM. It’s all about hazards, risks, floods, droughts
I started to count the number of times the word “risk” appears in the 34-page SPM. It’s over 200!
Who even read WG2? Shouldn’t there be a hat-tip to it in WG1?
Maybe clouds…
Or maybe a brain….
They’re scarecrows, you know.
It is because of plants that fossil fuels even exist. Since fossil fuels are bad for the environment then all forms of plant life must be bad of the environment. In the name of fighting climate change, all forms of plant life must be eradicated. All carbon atoms on this planet need to be sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks and encased in concrete. That will get rid of CO2 but CO2 is really only a very minor player compared to the primary greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. In the name of fighting climate change, all H2O on Earth must also be eradicated. The only question is how.
We could ship it to Mars
The twitter feed seems to reveal a tipping point.
Richard Betts seems to go off the deep end,endlessly self justifying himself.
Behaviour this unhinged will increase as the projections fall.
Behing the screen?
Pretty insubstantial figures.
Anthony Watts posted: “And then, work or not like the famous XKCD comic “Duty Calls” he comes back, But Steve has already left the building thinking Betts really did have work to do and ended the conversation:”
@ur momisugly johnsut1 May 3, 2016 at 6:27 am points out Mr Watts mistake:
“You’ve been caught out by twitters confusing timeline. All the posts at the bottom were posted before he said “I could go on, but I have work to do!”
Six hours and three blog posts later and Anthony Watts still has not corrected this erroneous jab at Dr Betts.
Saul,
There’s no getting around it, Betts was spanked hard by McIntyre.
Betts asserts — against a mountain of evidence — that the effect of more CO2 is “negative”. Betts is flat wrong. No wonder he skedaddled from McIntyre.
And just for fun, here’s the XKCD cartoon:
Question: What is the effect of the “greening of the planet” on the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere? There was a paper here a couple of weeks ago that estimated the half-life was (down to) some 35 years. It seems to me that if higher CO2 levels both promote green plant growth AND reduce the water needed for green plants to grow, then there’s an acceleration effect, to wit: plants will thrive in dryer areas and grow more leaves which will absorb more CO2.
In short, won’t higher atmospheric CO2 levels result in higher rates of absorption by green plants? And isn’t this self-limiting? If the worry (by some) is that mankind is upsetting the balance of nature by burning stuff, won’t nature rebalance itself to recycle CO2 faster?
The lunacy that Betts “directs”…
“…High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes (HELIX)
At HELIX we are assisting decision-makers and the research community in making adaptation to our changing climate more understandable and manageable by providing a set of credible, coherent, global and regional views of different worlds at 2, 4 and 6°C, with further focus on delivering the knowledge needs of Northern Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Europe….”
Even Gavin will admit models can’t project sh!t about the future at the regional level. Betts professes that he can provide “credible” views at the regional level. So can I, and it doesn’t require computer models.
Bettsy tweets all the headlines that didn’t make it into the Guardian.
Then goes back to his +6C computer games, whilst admiring his latest salary statement.
“there is still much to learn about how these processes will operate under future conditions that have not yet been experienced.”
ROFL – where is there a place on earth that has ever experienced anything but what has already been? Can he give an example of what he means by those conditions?
On Twitter, Steve McIntyre noted this part of Betts essay:
Despite claims to the contrary, the conclusions of the IPCC take CO2 fertilisation properly into account in the assessment of climate change feedbacks involving the carbon cycle, and in the assessment of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems. They are also starting to account for this in the knock-on consequences for water resources, but that is more cutting-edge science and less advanced.
He’s having none of that,
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agreed, and you could proceed –
He’s having none of that – thus bringing the lie into the world.
Next, a paper by an alarmist (Bates), finding errors in “feedback” estimates, and that CO2 warmi9ng effect is small . . from what I hear via Mr. Monckton.
This is what Richard Betts was saying in 2005: “Stabilising climate to avoid dangerous climate change
— a summary of relevant research at the Hadley Centre” – January 2005
Prepared by Geoff Jenkins, Richard Betts, Mat Collins, Dave Griggs, Jason Lowe, Richard Wood
I can’t find a link any more, but I have a copy.
“As CO2 and temperatures increase due to man’s activities, several things happen. Firstly, extra CO2 acts as a fertiliser and increases the growth of vegetation — particularly in northern forests where warming also encourages growth — and this helps to offset man’s emissions (although new tree growth may darken the surface and act to warm the planet).
But in some parts of the world, where rainfall decreases and higher temperatures increase evaporation, vegetation will die back. Thus, instead of carbon being drawn from the atmosphere, it will actually return to the atmosphere to enhance already increasing concentrations.
The same thing happens in much greater quantities and on a global scale in soils, as microbial activity is accelerated in a warmer climate and more carbon dioxide is emitted. The combined effect of all these changes to the amount of carbon stored in ecosystems is shown below. The strength of the vegetation sink starts to diminish in the latter half of this century, and by the final decades it turns into a net source.”
The settled nature of “the Science” is shown in their summary, AR4 was in preparation:
“What constitutes ‘dangerous’ climate change, in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, remains open to debate.
The physical (chemical and biological) climate system — or components of it — are capable of changing rapidly, and the trigger point for such abrupt changes could provide one of the ways of defining ‘dangerous’
We can also investigate the impacts of relatively gradual change — and their associated costs — to seek ways of defining a dangerous change.
The inertia of the climate system means that we could be committed to dangerous change, many decades before we reach the dangerous level.
Once we decide what degree of (for example) temperature rise the world can tolerate, we then have to estimate what greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere should be limited to, and how quickly they should be allowed to change.
These are very uncertain because we do not know exactly how the climate system responds to greenhouse gases
The next stage is to calculate what emissions of greenhouse gases would be allowable, in order to keep below the limit of greenhouse gas concentrations.
This is even more uncertain, thanks to our imperfect understanding of the carbon cycle (and chemical cycles) and how this feeds back into the climate system”
What about reflection of sunlight? Green plants reflect the green part of sunlight, green is in the peak of the spectrum, where the sunlight have most of it´s energy. If there is a significant increase in green surface coverage measured by satellites, there is a significant amount of energy reflected. Right?
Seems to me like increased greening of the surface cuts off a bigger piece of the top part of the solar spectrum. It cuts off radiation right where it´s most effective if increased co2 would be a risk that potentially could lead to threatening rise of temperatures.
Here, have some negative feedback.
Although, I think it´s a very far-fetched idea that co2 leads to a rise in temperature, so I think the planet is just saying thank you for the help in burning hydrocarbons, which would be impossible without humans, by giving us more plants so we can feed more people, grow our population and burn more oil. So there is not much need for negative feedback. It´s all about making energy flow faster, bigger and stronger. Everywhere in the universe,
OK, you had your chance. McIntyres spag against the wall will make a useful post to discuss his tactics.
How quaint. Dr. Joshua Halpern of Howard University aka “Eli Rabbet”, making threats, as if anyone gives a bunny’s behind what you write on that little blog of yours.
This gets even better:) Somebunny managed to cut off the time stamps from Richard Bett’s last set of tweets and shuffle them back to front to make is appear that Richard Betts came back after signing off. Curious because all the other tweets have time stamps.
Now some, not Eli to be sure, might think that there was a purpose to that.
Thats a screencap of that section of tweets exact as it appears in the browser, But begin the evil conspiracy bunny with the fake name that he is, Dr. Halpern would prefer to believe that the time stamps were modified intentionally. Twitter does indeed not present timelines well, as noted upthread, so if the tweets aren’t in chronological order, that may be the reason. The way I saw it, they came afterwards. I’ll have a look, and if a correction is needed, I’ll do it.
But I’m sure you’ll write up something terrible about all this on your microrant website, since that’s really all you have left.
Ah, I see you’ve already written something. Typical for you. Shoot first, make comments later.
Karma is coming for the bunny.
@Anthony Watts
Nobody is contesting the order the tweets appear in the screenshot. Your mistake was made regarding the interpretation of the order…on Twitter the newest tweets are at the top and earlier tweets appear below. What is offensive in my opinion is that this has been explained to you a week ago and no correction has been made.
In this card carrying skeptic’s (JREF) humble opinion you owe Dr Betts an apology or at the very least an acknowledgment that your accusation was a mistake.
Yes please Anthony – thanks in advance. Eli’s post shows the correct order, with times. My tweet “I could go on, but I have work to do” was indeed my final tweet, after my tweets citing the specific sections of the WG2 chapters.
Richard