Carbon out, carbon in

Interesting analysis.

Will there be enough clean water and clean soil and energy resources to harvest, process and distribute with our current infrastructure strategies to support your analysis?

When I read your book on genetics, I thought that the genetic information some deemed "garbage" was actually a natural system of genetic expression and information storage.

Genetics is very complex right? Well, can we multiply one set of genes by all the unique genetically coded organisms on earth and make assumptions about the genetic "health" of earth? I would say no.

Curious what you think about the complexity of earths climate. Most focus on a few variables, when, fact is, there are millions of direct factors involved.

Regardless of those simple paper factors, what about the pollution we are creating in the process?

Do those things attenuate genetic processes?

Brilliant stuff. (As usual; and thanks for the steer to CO2Science, stupid of me not to have found it before.)
I assume the growing studies were conducted with controls. I didn't follow ALL the links, you see. So the variable tested for was CO2, with other inputs such as nutrients and water in quantities as required?
So a nice demonstration will may be fisked by the warmists, on the grounds that other inputs are not equal, water being a prime candidate. Objection might be made from your last paragraph:
"...a plant growing in a higher CO2 air loses less water to the air because it does not have to open as many stomata." which might suggest the imminent transformation of the Amazon. Isn't this a closed system where transpiration from the trees falls as rain, feeds the trees, which transpire...? So closed stomata means less rainfall and a savannah climate in Brazil?

Worth pointing out that the studies are scientific and the projections of 9 billion people and 700 ppm CO2 are merely guesses based on extrapolation of trends. (What's the definition of a trend? Something that goes on until it stops.)

9 billion people in 2070 may be right, or at least it's plausible. Note that this is already a huge decrease in the projected increase from only a few years ago. 700 ppm just sounds to me a possibility on the wider outliers.
While corn soybeans and rice are getting great yields, so will everything else - weeds, trees, plankton - so with everything photosynthesising away like billy-o and a CO2 "half life" of only 11 years in the atmosphere it's hard to see where this big increase in plant nutrient is coming from. I'd guess it'll be used up pretty fast, as even small increases of CO2 lead to quite large increases of growth, as the trees in Central Park compared to the trees in Wyoming testify.

An increase in CO2 atmospheric concentrations from 380-400 to 680-700ppm sounds serious, right?

Well, here are some figures:

The average indoor room has 600ppm (more if you've got a stove or a cave.)

You won't notice a continuous level of 1,000ppm for your lifetime. This is the OSHA ventilation standard, which is ultra-precautionary.

Workplace laws prohibit a shift of more than 10 hours at more than 10,000ppm.

At 20,000ppm you might start to feel uncomfortable (sweaty, headache...) after several minutes.

Workers are not supposed to be exposed to more than 30,000ppm for more than 10 minutes.

At 50,000ppm CO2 is definitely toxic, you will die after long exposure.

At current rates of increase it will take planet earth 26,000 years to kill you by CO2.

Now... Where's my cigar?

The alarmists thrive on creating alarm, it is their oxygen - they cannot live without it. Even if, the earth were to warm as they claim it will because of CO2, they will point to increased temperatures and ignore any positive effect that may bring - as Lomborg reminded us, higher temperatures will kill fewer people during the the cold months ...

I suspect that their tone will change - if this current summer in the Northern Hemisphere were to average lower than "normal" temperatures, they will jump on the "Global Cooling" bandwagon and demand that we reduce CO2 because increasing CO2 levels are causing global cooling - so, they will switch

There is something about humans thriving and growing and the world getting better that drives them insane.

I have a question that is only remotely on topic.
I wonder if the gullibility of people to believe in predictions of Earth threats is because it is a relatively new phenomena?
Granted, one could argue religion has in one way or another scared people by threats.
But in this case I am thinking the culture hasn't had enough time, genetically speaking, to have a better defense against believing in threats against the Earth. Why is it a few "Scientists" have the ability to make us believe anything we could do could be worse than the Earth has already experienced?

Is the common sense gene a gene that has to be switched on over the course of time in a culture? Could there be such a thing as a gene that is activated within a culture by pressures within that culture? The learning of a notion becomes a facet of our genetic makeup? Can we look forward to generations that comprehend the difference between a scientific theory and a observable truth?

Have recently read the mind-blowing book "The Rational Optimist" and, though an avid reader, seldom has a book captivated my mind or attention to the extent this great one has.
AND ...... now, all this extra information to be added to the fund of knowledge is inspiring me to get a paper together on the fallacies of our Green Political party and those of 'Green' persuasion here in Ireland.
I trust Matt Ridley has no objections to being quoted ?

There are many reasons for doubting, but the scenario is just as plausible as any catastrophic one. Maybe more so.

Bruce, in answer to your question:
No, it's by no means a new phenomenon.
They thought the world was going to end around 1,000 AD as well. It took until around 1037 for the nonsense to stop, according to Tom Holland's "Millennium". (Cohen's book about it is pretty good as well.)
Interesting that the scare is pretty much confined to the Christian West. The Chinese, Indians and Africans just regard it as a boondoggle way of chiselling money or industrial advantage.

Worth noting that different ways of doing the measurements on this give you different results in a fairly systematic way. Chamber experiments give you bigger fertilisation effects, free-air carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) experiments (which seem to me a lot more plausible in most ways) considerably smaller ones: see Long et al in Science 2006 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/312/5782/1918.full.pdf Doesn't seem like great methodology to lump them all in together, though that does give big headline figures.

The 21.3% fertilisation effect reported for corn may be particularly germane here. There's no FACE data on corn at the site you link to. That's unsurprising, since FACE work is moderately expensive and there is no theoretical reason to expect carbon-dioxide fertilisation in corn at all, since it is a C4 plant. According to that Long et all paper there has, though, been some FACE work on maize, and it shows, unsurprisingly, basically no effect:
<quote>There has been no significant stimulation of yield at elevated [CO2] in any FACE study of either sorghum or maize to date. The average yield change for sorghum grown in FACE experiments was -1% and for maize was +1%, neither significantly different from zero</quote>
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/312/5782/1918/reply

While I wouldn't claim to be an expert it seems to me that techniques that show a significant fertilisation effect for a C4 plant -- an effect that would theoretically unexpected and is not found in the most field-like of experiments -- should be treated as suspect.

Also worth noting that while this still means that for C3 cereals more CO2 is good, ceteris paribus, the picture for livestock businesses is less clear, as the sure result of carbon dioxide fertilisation is reduced rubisco, and thus less protein per kilo forage.

In response to Oliver, it needs to be pointed out that the Long et al paper has been countered pretty comprehensively. Here is a summary from

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V9/N52/EDIT.php

``Long et. al. (2006) had a similar paper accepted for publication in the similarly-prestigious American journal Science, wherein they again contended that crop models based on non-FACE studies "have overestimated future yields," once again by the familiar factor of two.

Believing this claim to be grossly in error, we discussed it at some length in our editorial of 5 July 2006, wherein we accepted Long et. al.'s quantitative evaluations of the CO2-induced growth responses derived from FACE and non-FACE assessment techniques, but where we argued it was the FACE technique that was the more likely of the two approaches to be in error, citing two aspects of it - (1) rapidly-varying atmospheric CO2 concentrations around the targeted concentration in CO2-enriched treatments and (2) the fact that many FACE studies have only employed atmospheric CO2 enrichment during daylight hours - both of which phenomena have been shown to dramatically reduce CO2-induced growth responses in some studies. In giving Long et. al. the benefit of the doubt with respect to their quantitative evaluations, however, we apparently were far too generous, for an international team of ten specialists in the field has recently published a comprehensive and persuasive debunking of all of Long et. al.'s negative contentions about non-FACE experiments (Tubiello et. al., 2006).

The researchers' detailed criticisms of the Long et. al. (2006) paper focus on the latter's inattention to certain important "technical inconsistencies," as Tubiello et. al. call them, plus the fact that Long et al.'s findings were "lacking [in] statistical significance." When the pertinent data were properly analyzed, for example, the ten-member four-country team demonstrated that "the meta-analysis of Long et. al. (2006) does not [our italics] show significantly lower crop yield response to elevated CO2 in FACE compared to non-FACE experiments."

As further evidence for the validity of their findings, Tubiello et. al. note that when the air's CO2 concentration was raised to a value of 550 ppm in various prior experiments, "mean yields increased 17-20% in FACE, compared to 19-23% in non-FACE experiments," as they report has also previously been demonstrated by Amthor (2001), Kimball et. al. (2002), Gifford (2004), Long et. al. (2004) and Ainsworth and Long (2005). In addition, they demonstrated that "simulated yield responses to elevated CO2, as implemented in most crop models used for climate change impact assessment, are [our italics] consistent with FACE results," and that "any remaining differences in CO2 response based on FACE results would not significantly alter projections of world food supply in the 21st century."

Another of Tubiello et. al.'s important conclusions about atmospheric CO2 enrichment studies is the fact that "controlled environmental chamber, greenhouse, closed-top or open-top field chambers, or gradient tunnel approaches can continue to be used with reliable results," which has always been our view as well. The only questions remaining, therefore, are why some studies employing rapidly-fluctuating CO2 concentrations and/or daylight-only CO2 enrichment have yielded CO2-induced growth enhancements that have been much smaller than those of experiments where the atmosphere's CO2 concentration has not been subject to rapid fluctuations and where the CO2 enrichment has been applied for a full 24 hours per day.

With respect to FACE studies, the dichotomy in the first of these situations may be due to the fact that in most of them the large size of the plots employed may damp out the rapid CO2 concentration fluctuations that occur at the points of release of the CO2 before it reaches the plants. In the case of daylight-only vs. 24-hour-per-day CO2 enrichment, however, the answer is not so obvious. In any event, the important point of the Tubiello et. al. paper is that it clearly refutes the erroneous contentions of Long et. al. (2005, 2006) that FACE studies are far superior to studies that employ other types of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, and that studies based on all types of non-FACE techniques have overestimated the growth-promoting effects of elevated CO2 by an approximate factor or two. These contentions are absolutely false.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso

References
Ainsworth, E.A. and Long, S.P. 2005. What have we learned from 15 years of free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE)? A meta-analysis of the responses of photosynthesis, canopy properties and plant production to rising CO2. New Phytologist 165: 351-372.

Amthor, J.S. 2001. Effects of atmospheric CO2 concentration on wheat yield: review of results from experiments using various approaches to control CO2 concentration. Field Crops Research 73: 1-34.

Gifford, R.M. 2004. The CO2 fertilising effect - does it occur in the real world? New Phytologist 163: 221-225.

Kimball, B.A., Kobayashi, K. and Bindi, M. 2002. Responses of agricultural crops to free-air CO2 enrichment. Advances in Agronomy 77: 293-368.

Long, S.P., Ainsworth, E.A., Leakey, A.D.B. and Morgan, P.B. 2005. Global food insecurity treatment of major food crops with elevated carbon dioxide or ozone under large-scale fully open-air conditions suggests recent models may have overestimated future yields. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 360: 2011-2020.

Long, S.P., Ainsworth, E.A., Leakey, A.D.B., Nosberger, J. and Ort, D.R. 2006. Food for thought: Lower-than-expected crop yield stimulation with rising CO2 concentrations. Science 312: 1918-1921.

Long, S.P., Ainsworth, E.A., Rogers, A. and Ort, D.R. 2004. Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide: plants FACE the future. Annual Review of Plant Biology 55: 591-628.

Tubiello, F.N., Amthor, J.S., Boote, K.J., Donatelli, M., Easterling, W., Fischer, G., Gifford, R.M., Howden, M., Reilly, J. and Rosenzweig, C. 2006. Crop response to elevated CO2 and world food supply: A comment on "Food for Thought ..." by Long et. al., Science 312: 1918-1921. European Journal of Agronomy: 10.1016/j.eja.2006.10.002.''

All BS! Plants do not grow on CO2 only. They need soils and nutrients and fertilisers and tractor fuesl and more. "All other things" will not stay equal. Climate change, erosion, water shortages, reduced biodiversity, illnessess, pests, all on the increase. The professional optimists may scribble whatever they want. Realities will overtake your hopes and beliefs. We're at peak-oil level since 2005. Post-Peak-Oil modernity will start being rolled back. Less industrial production, less agricultioal production, end of globalisation, back to local production of what we need and what the remaining resources still provide locally. Best off will be those who are still living with a relatively modest life style, and with low grade of mechanisation, self-sufficiently. We will never ever get at the nine billion because we will collapse before. Famines, wars for the last crumbs of bread will decimate human numbers to level that might be sustained by what resources the planet, depleted after 250 years of modernity, will still be able to provide. There is no replacement for oil. The alternatives are electricity, whose production equipment is subsidized by oil. Cheers on the downslope - ecoglobe.ch

[...] Ridley has a good post on his Rational Optimist blog, where he does some back-of-the-envelope sums to figure out what the impact extra CO2 would (or [...]