Climate Change Reconsidered - again

TPP is honored to have selected to receive a copy of a Summary for Policymakers, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts (2014), a publication from NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change), not to be confused by the UN’s IPCC and their recent report on climate change.  The publication is a gift to TPP from Joseph L. Bast, President of the Heartland Institute (cost $8.95).  According to Joseph’s accompanying letter, “These findings disagree sharply with the alarmist findings of IPCC. As a trustee charged with safeguarding the finances of your institution and ensuring the integrity of its educational offerings [TPP’s alter ego served on his university’s foundation board for a decade], you should be well-informed on this controversial issue.  If your faculty is telling students “the science is settled” on climate change, and if your institution is spending millions of dollars on “sustainability” projects in the name of battling global warming, you should be crying foul.”

Wow!  Well, TPP will take a few minutes to examine this report and discuss it with colleagues and friends, and faithful blog readers too. 

This is a classic of denialism (others aren't so slick), and no one does it better than the Heartland Institute.  Without a bit of skepticism, without the experience to be able to spot the differences between science and phony science, without knowing enough science, you could be easily fooled. 

First, the Heartland Institute exists to obfuscate, confuse, and counter science, and they are good at it, the best corporate money can buy.  They figured out their basic tactic denying that smoking caused any health problems. Now Heartland is funded by ExxonMobil, American Petroleum Institute, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, all of whom are concerned that efforts to limit greenhouse gases might cut into their bottom line. 

Second, how can you know this publication is denial BS?  A good part of this document’s message is that carbon dioxide is good for the environment and makes plants grow better.  If you look at the references, and bear in mind this is just a summary and probably not the full set of reference (they say thousands), you see something curious.  The four sources about CO₂ and plants were published in 1902-1904, 1918, 1978, and 1983, and because they are included in the summary they must be really important ones.  Absolutely no studies are referenced that were done since scientists started to wonder and worry about climate change and carbon dioxide. That tells you a lot right there. One of the best, and only, long term studies of carbon dioxide and tropical tree growth was published in 2003 in the USA’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Clark, D.A., S.C. Piper, C.D. Keeling, and D.B. Clark. 2003. Tropical rain forest tree growth and atmospheric carbon dynamics linked to interannual temperature variation during 1984-2000. PNAS 100(10):5852-5857.), and if this study isn’t cited (or any of the 28 papers published by the principle authors (the Clarks) since 2003 then the publication is not an honest survey of  the biological impacts of carbon dioxide. 

Third, Heartland is very good at telling half a story. Increased carbon dioxide does increase photosynthesis and plants grow faster. But the other half of the story is that as the temperature goes up, so does photorespiration, and plants lose more fixed carbon, and at the same time, the rate of photosynthesis slows down such that the might be a tipping point.  Another recent report shows that enhanced carbon dioxide reduces the nutritional value of vegetation, so in light of that, the NIPCC’s conclusion that “The evidence is overwhelming that it [increased carbon dioxide concentration] has and will continue to help plants thrive, leading to …more food for a growing human population”, seems a bit over optimistic, and TPP remains under whelmed by the evidence presented.

So, that’s the short version, but without question this publication will fool lots of people and make for lots of press by those (and the politicians they've bought) whose fiscal interests are threatened by possible actions to slow global warming. 

The Heartland Institute - helping teachers get climate change "right"!

A nice booklet was mailed to TPP; it's titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science.  As a member of a number of conservation and scientific groups with major outreach functions, the booklet did not seem out of place until a careful look revealed that this was a publication from the Heartland Institute, a bought-and-paid-for science denial factory.  Teachers are urged to read this document and use it's facts and conclusions in their teaching.  The report was conducted by the “Nongovernmental International Panel of Climate Change” (NIPCC). Both the appearance of the report, it's title, and it's source acronym are intended to look and sound just like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and it's report on climate change Climate Change 2013: The physical science basis. This is a typical Heartland ruse to fool the unwary. Spoiler alert: the NIPCC doesn't find any evidence to suggest human activities have anything to do with climate change. And there's no evidence that smoking harms you or negatively affects your health either.  Yes, it's that Heartland Institute.  And the NIPCC report is replete with sciency citations and references, and authors with impressive sounding titles, foremost this and that.  A few years ago TPP let a graduate seminar dissect one of these type of reports, and they are all done the same way.  Data, facts, and conclusions are taken out of context, or cited selectively, i.e., only counting the ones that support their position, and ignoring those that don't agree with your position. Some of the original reports actually reached diametrically opposite conclusions to what they were cited to support.  The authors, rather than being real academics, were hired guns.  In other words, it was scientifically dishonest, from front to back. It's hard to argue policy; it's easier to pretend the science supporting climate change is uncertain, iffy, or politically motivated and this is the Heartland Institutes stock and trade.  And here's the biggest laugh; the NIPCC report starts by stating it was conducted under no political pressure.  That's actually true because the report was paid for by corporations that think science, real science, might result in policies that they won't like, like cleaning up their CO2 pollution. A recent study found that the majority of all the CO2 of human origins could be traced to just 90 corporations, and if they really were people they might have a conscience or a worry about what they are doing to all of us. And you can bet the money that paid for the NIPCC report came from among those 90. If you want to read more here's a link to the National Center for Science Education and their article on this report.  So maybe TPP will use their report for teaching, but he bets his students will figure out the ruse, again.

Forest transition to grasslands just a tipping point away

Accumulating evidence suggests that forests, communities dominated by trees, can quickly become grasslands with only some small changes in the environment particularly temperature (higher) and rainfall (lower), which often vary together. This comes as no surprise because one of the best long-term studies with which the Phactor is familiar, the still ongoing research that has been mentioned in this blog before, the monitoring of tropical forests by David and Deborah Clark, suggests the exact same thing. Tipping points are the big problem that looms by ignoring climate change and pretending that nothing needs to be done. What this means is that nothing much will happen as the trend of temperatures rising and rainfall dropping continues, and then in very short order, a forest becomes a grassland maintained by fire ecology. For a grassland to change back into forest takes falling temperatures and a lot more rain. But for people who live in the area, everything changes, plants, animals, agriculture. And even worse all that carbon locked up in wood gets released in short order, carbon dioxide that will help exacerbate the trend that caused the change. So tipping points will catch humans with their pants down around their ankles even though they are not unexpected. Unfortunately by the time you get to say "I told you so!" to do-nothing politicians it's too late, a cheerful thought.

Climate change "facts"?

Bob Carter is a geologist and a global warming denier. His recent opinion piece in The Age titled "An inconvenient fallacy" shows him using his own facts. Not being an expert on most of the issues, the Phactor will confine his criticism to just one fact. "Fact 3. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is beneficial. In increasing quantity it causes mild though diminishing warming (useful at a time of a quiet sun and likely near-future planetary cooling) and acts as a valuable plant fertiliser. Extra carbon dioxide helps to shrink the Sahara Desert, green the planet and feed the world. Ergo, carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor dangerous, but an environmental benefit."
First of all, does this guy think the Sahara is a desert because of the lack of CO2? OK, well, guess he doesn't garden or have house plants. Probably just a pet rock, and it seldom needs watering.
Next, the stuff about CO2 and plants is sort of OK, but when temperature gets added to the equation things change, and not only won't the Sahara get greener, the Amazonian rainforest might get a lot grassier, i.e., tree death may lead to a grassland savana replacing tropical rain forest. This change-over releases more CO2 because all those woody stems are store houses of CO2 that begin decomposing after the tree dies. This happens all the time, but if there are fewer trees to make wood, more CO2 will be released than taken up. Trees die because the rate of plant respiration continues to go up as temperature goes up, but photosynthetic rate tops out and then begins to decline. This means at higher temps more respiration, less photosynthesis. In one of the few long term studies, tropical tree mortality and average temperatures are negatively correlated; trees just respire themselves to death at higher temperatures. So our geologist is only correct if temperatures remain steady, but average temperatures are positively correlated to atmospheric CO2. Now of course the biologists who have been doing the study, my friends the Clarks, get their salaries and research money from grants, and their data and analyses that get published all have to get by lots of reviewers taking critical looks at their data, ideas, methodology, analyses, knowledge of science, etc., and they've been very successful for nearly 3 decades now. And in just 10 mins the Phactor let the air our of one of Prof. Carter's "facts". So who you gonna go with?

Plant Respiration Question

Dear Phytophactor,
My fiance and i have recently gotten into a debate about plant respiration.
She is worried about the amount of CO2 that plants may be giving off at night and prefers that we do not have them in the bedroom where we sleep.
I love plants....but i love her more.
So, the question is, what is the ratio of O2 to CO2 that plants give off? How much CO2 can a single medium size house plant give off in one night? How much CO2 is being produced if I have a bedroom full of plants? (five or six)?
I have searched the internet, and many sites agree that plants give off CO2 at night when they are in the process of respiration, but no one seems to provide any information about the exact amount of CO2 that plants actually produce.
Thank you!
Matthew

The Phytophactor responds:
Dear Matthew,
You make the Phactor feel like the Car Talk guys when you send me a question like this. The basic idea is correct; plants respire and give off CO2, all the time, and at night the respiration is not off set by photosynthesis, but here's the critical thing to understand. Plants respire at a much, much lower rate than a nice warm-blooded mammal. So if your fiance is worried about oxygen depletion and CO2 buildup at night, guess who ends up in another bedroom? Alternatively you could keep your bedroom really cool at night which will slow down plant respiration even more, while at the same time providing a good reason for keeping your warm carbon dioxide producing body around. Since your plants do grow, your plants are capturing more CO2 during the day than they release via respiration all day. The two cats sleeping on my bed respire a lot more than a whole roomful of plants. So plant respiration just isn't a problem, and here the Phactor stops short of saying a silly concern although it is, but I did hear this concern once with respect to giving plants to hospital patients. Even if plants gushed carbon dioxide at night hospital rooms and your bedroom are not sealed boxes, so gases can easily diffuse to equilibrate any tiny differences that might occur. So sleep well, the plants and their respiration aren't a problem; if they were we'd have be careful about entering my greenhouse or the rainforest at night, and both of them have far greater mass of plants respiring than your bedroom. Hope this helps you sleep in restful assurance, providing you do not handle being on the winning side of this debate with a certain air of superiority and condescension (And depending upon the particular nature of your fiance, please recall the scene in the 1st Star Wars movie where the R2D2 is beating Chewbacca at a chess-like game. Let the Wookie win may be very good pre-maritaladvice.).

From carbon dioxide to carbon dioxide - lesson from the tropics

Here in the rain forest life is a pretty dramatic process. While the great towering giants of wood have a aura of permanence about them, the tree turn over in a wet tropical forest is 2 to 3 times as fast as in temperate forests. Trees are great store houses of carbon dioxide, relatively short term reservoirs, and it is hard for people to rap their brains around the fact that all that stuff is primarily built out of a colorless, tasteless gas that only makes up a fraction of one percent of the atmosphere.

In the temperate zone we are used to seeing mushrooms pop up out of the ground, reproductive structures that are dwarfed by the huge filamentous organisms hidden from sight. And of course such fungi are the primary recyclers of cellulose and the other stuff trees and plants are built from. So you might expect to see lots of fungi on the ground in rainforests, but such is not the case. Decomposition is so fast here, no organic material builds up in or on the soil. Most of the fungi you see are growing right out of decomposing plant material. The fungi shown here are called "dead man's fingers", cute, eh? And they are growing out of a log that is pretty far along in terms of decomposition. The Phactor is not an expert on fungi, but he seems to remember that this fungus is called appropriately enough Xylaria, after xylem, wood. And so after being stored in this log for decades or in some cases even centuries, all that carbon dioxide is going back into the air. And if, as some of the best data indicates (see for link), even a slight increase in temperature causes a higher rate of tree mortality, then you have a very scary scenario where an increasing concentration of carbon dioxide is driving an increase in tree mortality and more carbon dioxide is being released.

Global warming denial made easy

An anonymous benefactor has presented the Phytophactor with a gift, the Skeptic’s Handbook on global warming by Joanne Nova. Uh, thanks. Make no doubts about it, the Phactor is a card-carrying skeptic from way back, but Joanne No-go isn’t a skeptic, she’s a denier. And her charming little booklet is just full of misinformation (you can get your own copy online, but I’ll not promote it by providing the link). The Smog Blog as debunked the main claims in this booklet as easy as 1, 2, 3.

The Phactor is no expert on climate, but he knows enough to say that we have reason for concern because the carbon dioxide data, the temperature data, and the tree growth/mortality data coincide very closely in one of the few well done long term studies. Yes, correlation is not causation, but it strongly suggests a connection. The worrisome part is that trees are massive storehouses of carbon. If rising temperatures lead to more tree mortality, that carbon is returned to the atmosphere as the trees decay. Why would increasing temperature cause tree mortality? Well, the rate of photosynthesis increases with temperature only to a point and then the rate declines quickly. However, the rate of respiration continues to increase with temperature. So beyond a critical temperature, trees respire faster than they capture carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, literally metabolizing themselves to death. If increased carbon dioxide leads to an increase in temperature, then the whole system is off to the races. The resulting climatic impact on agricultural regions would be disastrous especially for those of our species who have been living close to the edge of starvation. So the choice is to act now, while we can, to make what changes we can, or to wait until there is more certainty, and maybe as a result of waiting, have no chance for or choice of actions. For whatever their reasons deniers are willing to gamble with everyone’s future because they advocate doing nothing. This is neither wise nor pragmatic. It's OK to be skeptical, but don't be foolish.