I agree, CO2 is a plant food not a pollutant. While there is very little correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming, there may indeed be a correlation with increasing trendline crop yields. Perhaps we need higher CO2 levels in order to feed a growing world population.
According to NASA and EU satellite data, the amount of land area covered by stuff that has the same spectral characteristics as plants is increasing at the rate of 2.7 football fields per second.
Thank you for this 2019 reference, which may be located via the article title. It is open access. Here's the abstract: Satellite observations show that leaf area index (LAI) has increased globally since 1981, but the impact of this vegetation structural change on the global terrestrial carbon cycle has not been systematically evaluated. Through process-based diagnostic ecosystem modeling, we find that the increase in LAI alone was responsible for 12.4% of the accumulated terrestrial carbon sink (95 ± 5 Pg C) from 1981 to 2016, whereas other drivers of CO2 fertilization, nitrogen deposition, and climate change (temperature, radiation, and precipitation) contributed to 47.0%, 1.1%, and 28.6% of the sink, respectively. The legacy effects of past changes in these drivers prior to 1981 are responsible for the remaining 65.5% of the accumulated sink from 1981 to 2016. These results refine the attribution of the land sink to the various drivers and would help constrain prognostic models that often have large uncertainties in simulating changes in vegetation and their impacts on the global carbon cycle.
(This article could support Ph.D. candidate James Gomez's perspective. The article's carbon sequestration estimate from 1981 to 2016 of 95 ± 5 Pg Carbon is 95 ± 5 billion metric tons.)
Examination of an enlarged copy of Figure 1 from the above 2019 paper by Jing M. Chen et. al. shown in the supplemental materials section shows most of California has not seen an increase in the Leaf Area Index (LAI) in the 35 years between 1981 and 2016. This observation validates my previously-posted comment that the supply of water, not CO2 is the likely limiting factor for non-cultivated plant growth in California. Thus, it is unlikely in most parts of the state that California wildfires are influenced by increasing CO2 concentrations.
I surmise that it would be important to break out the areas where the LAI has increased and correlate those areas with the fire potential for that particular ecosystem.
For example, if the LAI increased significantly for those areas with plants that burn easily or are susceptible to fire, possibly in dry or drought prone conditions vs. a wet rain forest type environment either N. American or S. American. Big difference I would think.
Along the same lines, some trees comprise flammable saps and go up like matchsticks while others retain more water or have fire resistant barks.
Thanks. Clearly California wildfire intensity and California annual wildfire burned area is a multi-variable problem. not under control of single parameter such as atmospheric CO2 concentration.
One of the big problems in California has been the lack of forest vegetation management, particularly in the state's forests that have dried out as a consequence of prolonged drought. Increasing numbers of pine bark beetles were already a problem six decades ago. CGNP has repeatedly raised these points in our filings before the California Public Utilities Commission. For a recent example, see this February 7, 2023 U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region news release: "Survey Detects 36 Million Dead Trees in California." https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r5/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD1088646
California wildfires can be huge and consequential. In San Luis Obispo County, California, I recall the darkened skies when the smoke from the Thomas Fire was burning about 100 miles away. The Thomas Fire began on December 4, 2017 and was fully contained on January 12, 2018. On January 10, 2018, flash floods and mudflows from the fire's burn scar above Montecito, California blocked Highway 101 for several weeks. At least 21 died from the flash flooding there.
"Spectral characteristics" are the relative intensities of all the visible colors. Maybe some satellite hyperspectral imaging systems can see IR and UV too, and compare their spectra to plants in a greenhouse.
I remember when the big fires really started taking off up in the Northern part of California. I did a lot of work in sawmills. In 1990 the Sierra Club got the Spotted Owl added to the endangered species act and used that as a lever to stop most of the logging. Many of the mills closed. In 1992 just two years later we has the Fountain Fire. The number and intensity of the fires has increased isometricly every year since they pushed the loggers out.
🤣 No, it was widely believed it was a water truck owner that started it. They kept busy keeping the logging roads wet to prevent dust. CARB considers dust air pollution. When they shut down the logging the water truck guys were out of work, but they also had contracts with Cal-Fire to work the fires ....
Without taking a breath between they say that CO2 is NOT a fertilizer and therefore it's NECESSARY to limit it, and then CO2 IS a fertilizer and therefore it's NECESSARY to limit it.
Captain Obvious strikes yet again. At least they mention photosynthesis and relationship to increased CO2 levels. First time I've read that in the Hysterical Climate Disaster Goverment funded (our tax dollars) "research" papers. How the hell do these imbeciles think the earth has managed to feed 7-8 billion souls?
Let's say you write a rebuttal pointing out the significant errors, particularly in its math and assumptions, will the paper and all of the social media amplification of it be retracted? Will his thesis (if he's finished) be revoked and sent back to the drawing board? For the climate "science" community it doesn't matter if the research is wrong, the point is to add one more "attribution" study to the mix that the IPCC and the LLMs will access when constructing narratives around the role of human-caused CO2 emissions in destroying the planet.
Like I’ve said, there’s nothing that won’t blame on “climate change.” Hell, I spilled my morning tea and blamed it on the amount of plant food in the atmosphere!
CO2 concentration was 2,500 ppmv 150 million years ago. How did the planet not burn to a crisp? It declined on a nearly straight trajectory until 1750. It fell below 180 ppmv during the last six glaciations. When it falls below 150 ppmv, plants begin to die, and then so does everything else except bacteria, viruses, and maybe some fungi.
Where has it been going?
Marine plants and creatures worked out how to combine it with calcium to make bones and teeth and armor. When they die they sink to the bottoms of the oceans and become permanent limestone and chalk — some say more than 100 trillion tonnes of it.
If the nearly-linear decrease had continued, Gaia's suicide would have been complete in about eight million years. Fortunately, humanity intervened in the nick of time, postponing her suicide until about eighteen million years.
If we care about long-term life on Earth, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can. Well, at least China is doing that.
Maybe that's the answer to Fermi's famous "Where are they?" question: Most Gaias commit suicide before technology rescues them.
Read https://blackjay.net.au/the-species-that-saved-the-planet/ . And my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
one of the things I have always been confused by is how the CO2 concentration rose back from 180 to the pre-industrial level of about 320 without the help of all the ICE engines and electricity that are allegedly the key issue. or were those secretly invented in 1750 and mass produced but that story has been hidden from history?
I believe there has been a politically-motivated set of actions to obscure temperature records prior to about 1960 to create a favored narrative of recent global warming.
While I was in high school in the late 1960s, I recall reading in American History about the "Dust Bowl" in the 1930s - a time of elevated temperatures and droughts in the American Midwest. I would not be surprised if the Dust Bowl is now poorly documented in current high school history texts. (I think of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984 regarding this likely alteration of history.)
while I didn't get to high school until the mid-70's, I too remember the dust bowl history. I completely agree that history has been rewritten given the extreme leftward bias of the educational community
And that simple observation leads us to the solution to the problem! Plants, feeding on pollutants, are themselves pollutants, and should be eliminated. In doing so, we’ll be rid of wildfires and, eventually, people, at which point the climate can do whatever it likes without threatening the future of humanity! If I write this up long form, can I have a PhD?
When will NOAA fix their website on ocean levels? If I interpret it correctly, we’re looking at sea levels here in Maine are rising 0-1 feet per century. So 0.12 inches per year. How do you even measure that? Think of all the variables that affect a sea level measurement, especially in Maine where you can have eight-foot tidal differences. Considering the tides are affected by the sun & moon, which are NEVER in the same place relative to the earth and each other…
So I ask again, when will they “fix” their website? To be less obtuse, “fix” can mean “repair” or it can mean “fraudulently manage something to gain an advantage.”
I agree, CO2 is a plant food not a pollutant. While there is very little correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and global warming, there may indeed be a correlation with increasing trendline crop yields. Perhaps we need higher CO2 levels in order to feed a growing world population.
According to NASA and EU satellite data, the amount of land area covered by stuff that has the same spectral characteristics as plants is increasing at the rate of 2.7 football fields per second.
That piece of positive information is not being reported on by the MSM. Please provide a link.
Jing M. Chen, Weimin Ju, Philippe Ciais, Nocolas Viovy, Ronggao Liu, Yang
Liu, and Xuehe Lu. Vegetation structural change since 1981 significantly
enhanced the terrestrial carbon sink. Nature Communications, 10(Article
number 4259), September 2019.
Thank you for this 2019 reference, which may be located via the article title. It is open access. Here's the abstract: Satellite observations show that leaf area index (LAI) has increased globally since 1981, but the impact of this vegetation structural change on the global terrestrial carbon cycle has not been systematically evaluated. Through process-based diagnostic ecosystem modeling, we find that the increase in LAI alone was responsible for 12.4% of the accumulated terrestrial carbon sink (95 ± 5 Pg C) from 1981 to 2016, whereas other drivers of CO2 fertilization, nitrogen deposition, and climate change (temperature, radiation, and precipitation) contributed to 47.0%, 1.1%, and 28.6% of the sink, respectively. The legacy effects of past changes in these drivers prior to 1981 are responsible for the remaining 65.5% of the accumulated sink from 1981 to 2016. These results refine the attribution of the land sink to the various drivers and would help constrain prognostic models that often have large uncertainties in simulating changes in vegetation and their impacts on the global carbon cycle.
(This article could support Ph.D. candidate James Gomez's perspective. The article's carbon sequestration estimate from 1981 to 2016 of 95 ± 5 Pg Carbon is 95 ± 5 billion metric tons.)
Examination of an enlarged copy of Figure 1 from the above 2019 paper by Jing M. Chen et. al. shown in the supplemental materials section shows most of California has not seen an increase in the Leaf Area Index (LAI) in the 35 years between 1981 and 2016. This observation validates my previously-posted comment that the supply of water, not CO2 is the likely limiting factor for non-cultivated plant growth in California. Thus, it is unlikely in most parts of the state that California wildfires are influenced by increasing CO2 concentrations.
To your point Gene, see my comment re ecosystems and plant types.
https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/co2-worsens-wildfires-by-helping/comment/107218030
TC
I surmise that it would be important to break out the areas where the LAI has increased and correlate those areas with the fire potential for that particular ecosystem.
For example, if the LAI increased significantly for those areas with plants that burn easily or are susceptible to fire, possibly in dry or drought prone conditions vs. a wet rain forest type environment either N. American or S. American. Big difference I would think.
Along the same lines, some trees comprise flammable saps and go up like matchsticks while others retain more water or have fire resistant barks.
Thanks. Clearly California wildfire intensity and California annual wildfire burned area is a multi-variable problem. not under control of single parameter such as atmospheric CO2 concentration.
One of the big problems in California has been the lack of forest vegetation management, particularly in the state's forests that have dried out as a consequence of prolonged drought. Increasing numbers of pine bark beetles were already a problem six decades ago. CGNP has repeatedly raised these points in our filings before the California Public Utilities Commission. For a recent example, see this February 7, 2023 U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region news release: "Survey Detects 36 Million Dead Trees in California." https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r5/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD1088646
California wildfires can be huge and consequential. In San Luis Obispo County, California, I recall the darkened skies when the smoke from the Thomas Fire was burning about 100 miles away. The Thomas Fire began on December 4, 2017 and was fully contained on January 12, 2018. On January 10, 2018, flash floods and mudflows from the fire's burn scar above Montecito, California blocked Highway 101 for several weeks. At least 21 died from the flash flooding there.
Can you elaborate on that? What are “spectral characteristics” and how do they fit in to the various narratives?
"Spectral characteristics" are the relative intensities of all the visible colors. Maybe some satellite hyperspectral imaging systems can see IR and UV too, and compare their spectra to plants in a greenhouse.
Thanks!
🤔
It's political methinks
University of the People's Republic 🤦
I remember when the big fires really started taking off up in the Northern part of California. I did a lot of work in sawmills. In 1990 the Sierra Club got the Spotted Owl added to the endangered species act and used that as a lever to stop most of the logging. Many of the mills closed. In 1992 just two years later we has the Fountain Fire. The number and intensity of the fires has increased isometricly every year since they pushed the loggers out.
You think they pushed the loggers out in order to reduce the number of witnesses of the arsonists?
🤣 No, it was widely believed it was a water truck owner that started it. They kept busy keeping the logging roads wet to prevent dust. CARB considers dust air pollution. When they shut down the logging the water truck guys were out of work, but they also had contracts with Cal-Fire to work the fires ....
Without taking a breath between they say that CO2 is NOT a fertilizer and therefore it's NECESSARY to limit it, and then CO2 IS a fertilizer and therefore it's NECESSARY to limit it.
Captain Obvious strikes yet again. At least they mention photosynthesis and relationship to increased CO2 levels. First time I've read that in the Hysterical Climate Disaster Goverment funded (our tax dollars) "research" papers. How the hell do these imbeciles think the earth has managed to feed 7-8 billion souls?
Exactly 💯. I don't know how the thesis advisor looks at himself in the mirror.
he lives in a funhouse so the mirror is warped?
Let's say you write a rebuttal pointing out the significant errors, particularly in its math and assumptions, will the paper and all of the social media amplification of it be retracted? Will his thesis (if he's finished) be revoked and sent back to the drawing board? For the climate "science" community it doesn't matter if the research is wrong, the point is to add one more "attribution" study to the mix that the IPCC and the LLMs will access when constructing narratives around the role of human-caused CO2 emissions in destroying the planet.
Publish or perish now has an even lower bar!
Well done!
Like I’ve said, there’s nothing that won’t blame on “climate change.” Hell, I spilled my morning tea and blamed it on the amount of plant food in the atmosphere!
CO2 concentration was 2,500 ppmv 150 million years ago. How did the planet not burn to a crisp? It declined on a nearly straight trajectory until 1750. It fell below 180 ppmv during the last six glaciations. When it falls below 150 ppmv, plants begin to die, and then so does everything else except bacteria, viruses, and maybe some fungi.
Where has it been going?
Marine plants and creatures worked out how to combine it with calcium to make bones and teeth and armor. When they die they sink to the bottoms of the oceans and become permanent limestone and chalk — some say more than 100 trillion tonnes of it.
If the nearly-linear decrease had continued, Gaia's suicide would have been complete in about eight million years. Fortunately, humanity intervened in the nick of time, postponing her suicide until about eighteen million years.
If we care about long-term life on Earth, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can. Well, at least China is doing that.
Maybe that's the answer to Fermi's famous "Where are they?" question: Most Gaias commit suicide before technology rescues them.
Read https://blackjay.net.au/the-species-that-saved-the-planet/ . And my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Classic Van!
Oceans suck down Gigatons of CO2, raining carbonates into the abyss and feeding plankton along the way.
An exquisite lifegiving equilibrium system in addition to terrestrial.
one of the things I have always been confused by is how the CO2 concentration rose back from 180 to the pre-industrial level of about 320 without the help of all the ICE engines and electricity that are allegedly the key issue. or were those secretly invented in 1750 and mass produced but that story has been hidden from history?
I believe there has been a politically-motivated set of actions to obscure temperature records prior to about 1960 to create a favored narrative of recent global warming.
While I was in high school in the late 1960s, I recall reading in American History about the "Dust Bowl" in the 1930s - a time of elevated temperatures and droughts in the American Midwest. I would not be surprised if the Dust Bowl is now poorly documented in current high school history texts. (I think of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984 regarding this likely alteration of history.)
while I didn't get to high school until the mid-70's, I too remember the dust bowl history. I completely agree that history has been rewritten given the extreme leftward bias of the educational community
Thank goodness we also have John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath which helps to preserve the Dust Bowl history.
my concern is given the effort to rewrite classics, they will do the same there
Sadly, always a possibility with scoundrels,
I surmise that the CO2 equilibrium involving air, land and sea plays a significant role.
Thanks! Enjoyed listening while working this morning! The climate narrative is crazy powerful.
Yeah, the downside is that there are no wildfires in the Sahara to study
And that simple observation leads us to the solution to the problem! Plants, feeding on pollutants, are themselves pollutants, and should be eliminated. In doing so, we’ll be rid of wildfires and, eventually, people, at which point the climate can do whatever it likes without threatening the future of humanity! If I write this up long form, can I have a PhD?
Rick, that is a great point. Let's start the defoliation campaign ASAP!
😂😂😂😂
Hello Roger, perhaps a topic of desperation for a PhD thesis 🥴😂
Wow, so which is it? Do we want to save the trees or don’t we?!🤌🏻
When will NOAA fix their website on ocean levels? If I interpret it correctly, we’re looking at sea levels here in Maine are rising 0-1 feet per century. So 0.12 inches per year. How do you even measure that? Think of all the variables that affect a sea level measurement, especially in Maine where you can have eight-foot tidal differences. Considering the tides are affected by the sun & moon, which are NEVER in the same place relative to the earth and each other…
So I ask again, when will they “fix” their website? To be less obtuse, “fix” can mean “repair” or it can mean “fraudulently manage something to gain an advantage.”
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
What a Team! Two times their great work of one.
Thank you, Stephen. Please cross-post.
Wow. I had no idea it was this bad at colleges. I’m sure the skids get A and B grades. Hopefully it is better in STEM.
Sadly this thesis is in a UC Riverside STEM department (Earth and Planetary Sciences.)