I was delighted to join Richard Tice last Sunday on his excellent Talk TV Sunday morning show to discuss some of the recent good environment news that is ignored by mainstream media. More Arctic ice, polar bears, seals and coral, of course. Great to be getting on with, but is there no end to all these glad tidings? Now, scientists have shown that world food production has soared in recent decades as carbon dioxide has taken small steps to reclaim atmospheric levels common through geological time until the relatively recent past. One Italian scientist estimated that reducing atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial levels would lead to an 18% decrease in the production of many basic global foodstuffs.
The current level of atmospheric CO2 at 419 parts per million (ppm) is near an all-time low. If it goes much lower, say to around 180 ppm, plant and human life will start to die off. According to the ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, over the last 500 million years the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has fallen from 15,000 billion tonnes to just over 850 billion tonnes. A minute part of this enormous capture is released during periods of natural warming, especially from the vast stores held in the Earth’s oceans. Many scientists remain relaxed about rising levels of CO2. Dr. Roy Spencer, the former senior scientist at NASA, also notes the beneficial effect on plants, adding: “Though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere.”
Of course the current alarm about CO2, politicised in the interest of pushing the command-and-control Net Zero project, is about its warming effects in the atmosphere. But links showing an automatic increase in temperature after a rise in CO2 are hard to find throughout the 600 million year climate record. One interesting hypothesis gaining scientific ground is that the gas becomes ‘saturated’ after a certain point, and its warming properties fall dramatically. This hypothesis is not proven to the satisfaction of all, but it remains a more plausible explanation of past observed trends than the automatic linking proposition that has become part of ‘settled’ science.
What is beyond dispute is that the Earth has ‘greened’ dramatically over the last 40 years, thanks to the extra gas. It has been estimated that there has been a 14% increase in vegetation, mostly due to higher levels of CO2 in this period. In a paper published in 2016 by 32 authors from eight countries, it was noted that there was a “persistent and widespread increase” in growing season greening over 25-50% of the global vegetated area. Recent increases in global vegetation are shown at the top in a picture compiled by NASA. More vegetation of course means more food up and down the chain. Every form of life benefits, from insects to tigers, and of course humans.
On September 14th, the Daily Sceptic reported on the work of four Italian scientists who have undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that a “climate emergency” is not supported by the data. They also noted a considerable recent ‘greening’ of plant biomass caused by higher levels of CO2. Helped also by big improvements in agricultural technology, food yields have soared. Four crops, maize, rice, soybean and wheat, are noted to provide 64% of human caloric intake.
The graph above shows the huge recent gains in these yields over the last 60 years. The annual gains are between 2.4% and 3.8%. Of course, without these rises in agricultural productivity, the world would be a much poorer and hungrier place. The Italian scientists do more than hint at this when they note: “Global greening is a cultural challenge that leads us to reflect on the positive implications of the increase in the atmospheric levels of CO2.”
The climate science site No Tricks Zone recently highlighted two further scientific studies that showed higher CO2 fertilisation effects were driving global greening and enhancing photosynthesis. A group of agri-scientists suggested there would be a 30-50% increase in photosynthesis with CO2 in a range from 451 to 720ppm. This would lead to a 25% increase in crop yield. The scientists looked in particular at barley and found an increase in yield of 54% if CO2 rose to 700ppm.
Meanwhile, another group of scientists have found that elevated levels of CO2 are very helpful for fruit trees, producing “increased photosynthesis, efficient use of water, growth and biomass”. With CO2 at 600-750ppm, plants will grow 30% faster. Research is said to be lacking for fruit compared to many other crops, but the authors conclude that: “There is undoubtedly a ‘fertilisation effect of CO2’ on fruit species that increases with the advance of climate change.”
Climate, of course, is always changing, and the cancelling of debate about the subject under the ‘settled’ science directive is little more than an insult to the intelligence. There is presumed to be a wholly deleterious effect on the climate caused by humans burning fossil fuel. But no credible, peer-reviewed science paper yet exists that proves conclusively that humans cause all or most recent global warming. There is simply an assumption that higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will be catastrophic, producing warming that to date has only been seen in climate model guesses. No wonder many scientists are relaxed about higher levels of CO2. Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original founders of Greenpeace, has even said he looks forward to the day when governments will meet to sign treaties promising to increase their carbon emissions.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
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The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
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It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!