The hysteria over global warming and its corollary that “people are the problem” drowns out and, in some cases cuts off, legitimate scientific evaluation of environmental relationships. Suppose, for example, scientists demonstrated that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air really were rising, and they would rise to levels which sonic researchers today would call “catastrophic.” What would life in such an atmosphere be like?
Popular media and certain environmental groups paint devastating pictures. Widespread flooding, increased disease, terrible weather aberrations and loss of human life are common aspects of their scenarios. But are these dangers real? Do all scientists agree?
Scientists who appear in The Greening of Planet Earth,1 emphatically do not. Produced by the Institute for Biospheric Research and funded by the Western Fuels Association, the video makes the case that the world needs more, not less, carbon dioxide. Crops of all sorts, trees, and human beings would all flourish, it argues, if carbon dioxide would continue to rise.
The scientists who appear in The Greening of Planet Earth represent almost two hundred years of scientific research in the fields of agronomy, botany, forestry, meteorology, oceanography and water conservation with university laboratories and the United States government. Their research findings compel a much closer examination of the carbon dioxide controversy. What if CO2, were the environment and man’s friend and not the enemy?
First things first
While levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere rose from 270 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial age began to 315ppm in the 1950s, this does not begin to approach levels of CO2 which characterized earlier earth history. The evidence for just how much carbon dioxide used to be free in the earth’s atmosphere lies in the vast reserves of oil, coal and natural gas — the so called ‘fossil fuels’ which underpin most industrial economies.
At one time all the carbon locked in these resources was in the atmosphere but over time plants absorbed CO2, using the carbon to build their cellular structure. As these plants died and fossilized they removed tremendous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. Burning those fuels, the video points out, now “returns” to the atmosphere some of the carbon dioxide which, in previous ages, had always been present.
Bigger crops
Scientists have already begun to investigate what would happen to crops in an atmosphere that contained greater levels of carbon dioxide. The results outlined in the video should make anyone concerned with agriculture worldwide sit up and take notice.
Dr. Leon Allen, an agronomist with the University of Florida reports that crops like rice and soybeans increased their yields by 30 and 40 percent when grown in an atmosphere of double the usual level of carbon dioxide. Dr. Jeffery Baker, also an agronomist with the University of Florida, reports:
We’re getting, typically, anywhere from 30 to 40 percent increases in grain [rice] yield. We get increased carbon uptake through photosynthesis. We get a decline in carbon loss during nighttime respiration. We also get a decline in total water use, and all this translates into an increase in grain yield, which is the useful portion of the plant with rice.
Agronomists working with wheat, oats and cotton report similar findings. “A world in which CO2 concentration has doubled is one in which the plants will enjoy it a lot more,” says Dr. Bruce Kimball, with the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Water Conservation Laboratory. “They have been, in effect, eating the CO2 out of the air for a long time and they’re rather starved for CO2.”
More food, less water
Increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would also sharply decrease the amounts of water crops need — even though the greater amounts of CO2 vastly improve yields, the scientists report.
Researchers report that plants exposed to greater amounts of carbon dioxide open their stomates, or pores, less widely during the respiration or night phase of photosynthesis. Because the stomates open less widely, plants lose less of their moisture to the air and thus require less water.
Dr. Herman Mayeux, with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, calls the increased water-efficiency under higher levels of carbon dioxide “marvelous.” He also notes that it takes place in all the plants scientists have studied so far. Kimball concurs, and declares that the increased CO2 efficiency has a salutary effect on plants experiencing water-stress:
We find that for the most part, it appears that there is a greater stimulation of growth under conditions of water stress at high CO2, so to some extent the higher CO2 compensates for water stress.
Dr. Sherwood Idso, with USDA’s Water Conservation Laboratory, agrees and adds that increased carbon dioxide could lead some of the desert areas, which some had claimed were expanding, to retreat.
“In very general terms, you should see a real greening of the desert,” Idso says. “You should see grasses and small shrubs moving out onto areas where they could not live, survive and reproduce before. Then there should also be a tendency for bushes and shrubs to grow where only grasses have grown in the past. And of course, forests should greatly expand their ranges.”
Enter the giant trees?
If increased carbon dioxide leads to more forested land, what sorts of forest would there be? What kinds of trees would they contain? Researchers estimate that the species probably would not change, but that individual trees might be a lot larger.
Dr. Donald Graybill, with USDA’s Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, has spent years studying tree growth by examining the Bristlecone pine in the Western United States. Bristlecone pines interest scientists because they are the oldest living organisms in the world and thus provide a unique window onto the impact environmental changes can have on trees and tree growth. After focusing specifically on Bristlecones in high elevations, Graybill concludes that increased carbon dioxide is very helpful for tree growth.
“One of the very important points that must be understood and is crucial to this story,” Graybill says, “is that we see a tremendous growth spurt in the past one hundred or so years that we have not seen in the past few thousand years in these trees.”
Dr. Idso has conducted experiments with sour orange trees that found nearly explosive growth occurs at higher CO2 levels.
We have followed these trees… for about four years now and the enriched trees have almost tripled their biomass. That is, they have grown approximately three times faster than the trees growing in normal air. Now this response is so incredible. It suggests that were the CO2 content of the atmosphere to double, the growth rates of earth trees would triple.
Model problems?
Of course it’s all very well and good to report what a rise in carbon dioxide levels might do for plants, but what of the alleged effect of “global warming?” Some allege that increased levels of carbon dioxide will lead to a “greenhouse effect” that traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere and will lead to catastrophe. Are they correct?
Most of these scenarios arise from computer models that attempt to mimic, via computer, global atmospheric conditions. The problem, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, is that the models are often riddled with errors when it comes to simulating complex systems such as those which contribute to global climate:
An easy way of describing [the model’s] inability is to note that there are all sorts of things like cloud cover, water, heat transport, that in present models have errors on the order of 50 percent. And such errors absolutely swamp the effects of a doubling of carbon dioxide. As long as the models have errors that can swamp the effect you are looking for, you cannot regard the models as credible.
“It’s garbage in, garbage out,” Lindzen continues, “If you put in a bad parameterization, if you put in inadequate resolution, you do not have credible answers coming out. It’s not as though I would believe the models if they only gave me that it would get colder. There’s no basis for believing them.”
Lindzen points out that climate fluctuations have always occurred and nothing about recent fluctuations looks any different than what we have experienced before. “We’ve gone from ice ages to warm periods. We had a warming since then, but we are not as warm as it was during the Medieval Period when you had grape growth in Scotland, you know, and so on,” Lindzen says.
Lindzen and other researchers stress that the earth has its own established mechanisms for dealing with temperature increases. The increased production of algae and other, land-based, microorganisms which, for example, give rise to substances which help form clouds. These, in turn, cool the earth.
Conclusion
Although the scientists who appear on the Greening of Planet Earth do not present all the answers in the global warming controversy, they certainly do offer a significantly different understanding of the role increased carbon dioxide might play in human and other life. Certainly policy makers, and the public at large, need to see this video.
Endnotes
1 Institute for Biospheric Research, Inc, The Greening of Planet Earth.
