Claim: 1.5C Global Warming by 2030 – But There is Still a Chance to Avoid 2C

Indeed, they are already frightening gullible people with claims of ocean acidification; the notion of “air acidification” would really get such people alarmed.

The Jasper Ridge researchers were trying, so very, very hard, to find a way to report the conclusion that CO2 emissions are harmful. The problem they needed to overcome is that a century of scientific studies have consistently shown that elevated CO2 is highly beneficial, for nearly all plants.

So they baked their little CO2-supplemented wild grass plots under heat lamps, at absurdly high wattages, supposedly to simulate the warming effect of eCO2. Yet their baked grasses stubbornly continued to thrive.

I would agree with you, that such contortions are hilarious, if they weren’t so destructive.

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age.” ‑Prof. Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT)

Notice, also, the ladies’ wind-blown hair, in that Jasper Ridge photo. Ridges tend to be windy, and Jasper Ridge is no exception. One of the problems with F.A.C.E. studies is that wind causes unnaturally large fluctuations in CO2 levels. That’s why F.A.C.E. studies usually under-report the benefits of eCO2. (Open-top container [OTC] and greenhouse studies are generally more accurate.) Prof. George Hendrey explained the problem, here, and here’s a paper about it.

Prof Hendrey wrote:

“Much of what is known about global ecosystem responses to increasing atmospheric CO2 has been gained through Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiments of my design. All FACE experiments tend to underestimate ecosystem net primary production (NPP) that may occur at a particular increased concentration of CO2. This is because of the sensitivity of photosynthesis to rapid and poorly controlled variation in CO2 concentrations that are an inevitable result of the FACE technique. We are working on development of a NPP correction based on photosynthesis experiments in which CO2 is oscillated in a controlled way in a leaf chamber while measuring photosynthetic fluorescence.”

So, not only did the Jasper Ridge researchers bake their wild grass plots under unrealistically high infrared radiation levels, they also chose a methodology (F.A.C.E.) which is known to underestimate CO2’s benefits, especially in windy conditions, and they chose an especially windy study site!

Yet another problem with the Jasper Ridge studies is that, in the long term, the biomass metric which they measured is limited by crowding. That makes the results of a many-year study of wild grasses inapplicable to agriculture. In the long term, unharvested grasses cannot continue to add much biomass, no matter how excellent the conditions for growth, simply because there’s no room for it.

We live in deeply unscientific times. Not all fields are as bad as “climate science” and “grievance studies.” But the peer-reviewed academic literature famously reports that most peer-reviewed study results are wrong:

• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, by John P. A. Ioannidis, 2005. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. 

Frankly, I don’t know why the Jasper Ridge researchers went to so much trouble, to try to justify reporting harms from eCO2 that they surely must have eventually realized simply do not exist. It would have been much easier to just pretend, like activist journalist Annie Sneed did in Scientific American.