Clean Power Plan Means Death for Coal

In a new Science Bulletin paper, Christopher Monkton, Willie Soon, David Legates, and William Briggs respond to those who attacked their enormously popular January Science Bulletin paper showing a simple climate model they developed better reflects actual temperatures and temperature trends than the complex models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most criticisms focused on the simplicity of the model, arguing the model’s “extreme simplification necessarily leaves out many physical processes.” The new paper shows the simple model generally hindcasts observed temperatures more accurately than complex models. Monckton et al. conclude the simple model exhibits at least as much predictive ability as more complex, widely used climate models.

New research published by the American Geophysical Union suggests massive aquifers underneath the world’s deserts act as carbon sinks, storing more carbon than all the plants on land combined.

Scientists examining the flow of water through Tarim Basin, a Venezuela-sized desert valley in China, found the waters used by farmers to irrigate their crops along the desert’s edge carry a surprising amount of dissolved carbon dioxide deep into the Earth. The scientists found the amount of carbon dioxide entering the desert aquifer jumped dramatically around the time the Silk Road opened the region to farming. They estimate the amount of carbon dioxide disappearing under the Tarim Desert annually is approximately 12 times greater than would otherwise be captured in the absence of agriculture. The carbon dioxide remains underground for tens of thousands of years. “The carbon is stored in these geological structures covered by thick layers of sand, and it may never return to the atmosphere,” said the study’s lead author, Yan Li, a desert biogeochemist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It is basically a one-way trip.”

Extrapolating from their data, the authors estimate the world’s desert aquifers contain as much as 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide – a quarter more than the amount stored in living plants on land.

A study recently released by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency explodes the myth 97 percent of scientists agree with statement made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the summary of its fifth assessment report, “It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”

The Netherlands agency finds the number of scientists agreeing with IPCC is less than 50 percent. The agency surveyed approximately 6,550 scientists studying climate change. Of the 1,868 scientists responding to the survey, 64 percent (1,222) agreed humans have caused more than 50 percent of the recent warming. Of those 1,222 respondents, 65 percent (797) said they were 95%+ certain. Those 797 respondents are just 43% of all 1,868 respondents. Thus the agency finds only a minority of climate scientists agree with IPCC’s key headline-making, statement.

Historian John Steele Gordon argues few phrases in today’s political lexicon are more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers.” He points out the first is an oxymoron since science is never settled: It is always subject to change pending new evidence. The second phrase is a clear ad hominem attack meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers.” Since Earth’s climate is an enormously complex system, much of which even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges it does not understand well, to say the science is settled is itself a form of denial.

Steele lists a number of unanswered climate questions including, “Why did the warming trend between 1978 and 1998 cease, although computer climate models predict steady warming? How sensitive is the climate to increased carbon-dioxide levels? … Why did episodes of high carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere earlier in Earth’s history have temperature levels both above and below the average?”

With so many open questions, Steele concludes the quest for expanded power is why so many climate scientists, interest groups, and politicians want to close down debate and engage in name-calling. He notes, “If anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then that would be a huge problem only government could deal with. It would be a heaven-sent opportunity for the left to vastly increase government control over the economy and the personal lives of citizens.”

Numerous studies show increasing carbon dioxide levels improve the productivity of terrestrial plants, and a new study in Marine Biology shows the same benefit for seagrasses. Seagrasses are critical to the ocean food chain. They photosynthesize, so most grow in shallow and sheltered coastal waters. Seagrass beds are diverse, productive ecosystems, harboring hundreds of species providing food and critical habitat for juvenile and adult fish, algae, mollusks, green turtles, dugongs, manatees, geese, swans, sea urchins, and crabs. Y.X. Ow and other researchers at Australia’s James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science note, “given the important ecological functions of seagrass meadows, understanding their responses to CO2 will be critical for the management of coastal ecosystems.”

Ow et al. examined the physiological responses of three tropical seagrasses, exposing them to a range of seawater carbon dioxide levels approximating concentrations scientist estimate could exist by the end of 2100. They “demonstrated that tropical seagrasses can increase their photosynthetic rates, adjust photosynthetic performance and increase growth rates in response to CO2 enrichment.” Furthermore, the ability of sea grasses “to utilize the greater CO2 availability suggests that they will thrive under future scenarios of climate change.”