Satellites Have Recorded No Statistically-significant Global Warming Over Nearly the Past Two Decades

CO2 'Pollution' Is Greening the Planet

May 9, 2016

Larry Bell, Newsmax - If there’s anything that climate crisis theology clerics hate more than fossil fuels, it’s got to be any glad tidings about CO2. Like, for example, results of a global satellite study published last month in the journal Nature. It reported that thanks to that “pollutant,” the planet is producing lots more veggies even the most strident non-carnivorous ideologically-superior planetary salvationists should truly celebrate.

How much more?

Well, according to the 32 researchers from nine countries, it amounted to “a persistent and widespread increase” of greening over 25 to 50 percent of the “global vegetated area” over the past 35 years. Less than 4 percent of the globe showed a reduction. Of the 85 percent of Earth’s ice-free lands, the areas covered in green average about 32 percent of that amount.

The additional leaves laid out in a carpet would cover the continental U.S. twice over.

If you have been holding your breath wondering why this is occurring, go ahead relax . . . take some blameless credit.

Based upon simulated ecosystem models, the researchers credited 70 percent of this green bounty to CO2 fertilization benefits. They attributed another 9 percent to nitrogen fertilizers and 4 percent to shifts in land management, neither of which explain observed added forest growth.

A 2013 study of temperate and boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere (also published in the journal Nature), reported a substantial increase in water-use efficiency over the past two decades which was much larger than predicted by biosphere models. This was attributed to increased ecosystem-level photosynthesis, net carbon uptake and decreasing evapotranspiration (water loss).

And here’s the part some authors of the most recent report obviously had to struggle with. They attributed the third greatest beneficial influence — 8 percent — to “climate change”. 

This admission must have been particularly painful for co-author Philippe Ciais from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France, who has also served as an author for reliably alarmist UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

True to form, Ciais said: 

“The fallacy of the contrarian argument is two-fold. First, the many negative aspects of climate change are not acknowledged.

"Second, studies have shown that plants acclimatize to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.”

Well actually, no. He’s wrong on both accounts.

Regarding the first “fallacy,” as Judith Curry, former chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology has pointed out:

“It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values and preference for the empirical [i.e., what has been observed] versus the hypothetical [i.e. what is projected from climate models].”

As for claims that CO2 fertilization benefits are temporary, leading CO2 plant growth authority Craig Idso, who chairs the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, finds no empirical evidence exists to support a model-based claim that future carbon uptake by plants will diminish due to rising temperatures.

In fact, just the opposite has been observed in the real world.

Over the past 50 years, global carbon uptake by plants has doubled. CO2 boosts water use efficiency.

Increased CO2 fertilization enables plant leaves to extract more carbon from the air — lose less water — or both — during photosynthesis, a process that converts sunlight and soil nutrients into sugars which fuel life.

Many plants also tolerate heat better when CO2 levels are higher, a condition evidenced by satellite imagery of deserts and savannas where greenery expansion is more apparent than in wet locations.

Lead author Zaichun Zhu from Peking University told BBC News,

“The greening reported in this study has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system.”

In many regions of the world, a warmer planet will lead to more precipitation and longer growing seasons. This results in far fewer deaths from starvation and winter hypothermia.

And yes, although just not happening very recently, climate change is very real.

Despite “record high” atmospheric CO2 levels, other than 1998 and 2015, ocean El Nino temperature spikes, satellites have recorded no statistically-significant global warming over nearly the past two decades.

Nevertheless, this “pause” is occurring within a nearly two-century-long natural warming trend which began before the Industrial Revolution introduced fossil-fueled smokestacks and SUVs.

Those same fossil fuels displaced use of firewood, preserving more forests to exchange CO2 for oxygen we and Bambi depend upon while also returning plant fertilizer to grow more food in the bargain.

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University puts the real story into perspective:  

“Global greening is the most important ecological trend on Earth today. The biosphere on land is getting bigger, year by year, by two billion tons or even more.”

That sort of “pollution” deserves a grateful world of gratitude.

The Judicial Branch Struck Back Against Obama's Overreach, But Because Justice Scalia's Death Invalidates His Opinions in Pending Cases, Everything is Now Tipped in Obama's Favor

Justice Scalia heard and potentially already cast votes in several high-profile cases. Scalia’s votes in those cases will be invalidated, sending the justices back to the drawing board to renegotiate those decisions. His death will likely also lead to 4-4 splits on some key issues, with the remaining four liberals and four conservatives facing off against each other. When the court splits down the middle on a case, it does not create a binding legal precedent for the country. Whatever the lower court decided is affirmed, and that ruling only applies to their circuit — leaving legal conflicts among circuits unresolved. Or the court can put the case over for re-argument, essentially telling both parties to try again when the court is back to a full bench.


Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia poses with his family in his chambers before court ceremonies on Sept. 26, 1986, in Washington. Pictured are, front row, from left: Margaret Jane; Justice Scalia, Christopher and Mary. In the back are, from left: Maureen Scalia, Ann Forrest, Catherine, Matthew, Eugene, John and Paul. (Bob Daugherty/Associated Press)

Justice Antonin Scalia’s son spoke of his father's influence on his family at his funeral Feb. 20. Rev. Paul Scalia said "God blessed dad with a love for his family." Click here for video. 

The legislative and judicial branches strike back against Obama’s overreach

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” - Newton’s Third Law of Motion 

By George F. Will, Opinion Writer at The Washington Post

February 19, 2016

  

Notice the Newtonian physics of America’s Madisonian system. Barack Obama’s Wilsonian hostility to the separation of powers, expressed in his executive authoritarianism, is provoking equal and opposite reactions from the judicial and legislative branches.

The Supreme Court has inflicted on Obama a defeat accurately described as the court’s most severe rebuke of a president since it rejected Harry Truman’s claim that inherent presidential powers legitimated his seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War. The court has blocked Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which rests on the rickety premise that the Clean Air Act somehow, in a way unsuspected for four decades, empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to annihilate the right of states to regulate power generation.

It is unprecedented for the Supreme Court to stop a regulatory regime before a lower court has ruled on its merits. This is condign punishment for the EPA’s arrogance last year after the court held that it had no authority for a rule regulating fossil fuel-fired power plants in Michigan. The EPA snidely responded with a gloating statement that the court’s decision came too late to prevent it from imposing almost $10 billion in costs under the illegal rule.

The legislative branch, too, is retaliating against executive overreach. Consider the lethal letter Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) sent to the Education Department concerning its Office for Civil Rights.

Carbon Dioxide is Generally Regarded as a Safe and Non-toxic, Inert Gas

While convenient to use the term 'carbon emissions', it's not accurate to conflate it with 'CO2', carbon dioxide. CO2 is a vaporous (invisible) gas, NOT soot or dust or grit -- in other words, not an air pollutant. The Supreme Court, under the Clean Air Act, made a huge mistake in allowing the EPA to control it, and it needs to be reversed. The enormous hoax, promulgated by the anti-capitalist, that we can manage climate by keeping fossil fuels 'in the ground' is so heavily entrenched in the dogma of our public schools that the little skulls of 'mush' are already seriously tainted.  It'll take generations to straighten this mess out.

The term ‘carbon pollution’ is unscientific and misleading

February 20, 2014

JustFactsDaily - “Language is power,” and “with careful selection of and modification to language,” wrote Evie Loveband in the journal Idiom, any one person “has the power to control the debate and rewrite history.” This truism spurs endless debates over terminology in the political arena: Are we talking about an “unborn child” or a “fetus”? Is he “gay” or “homosexual”? Are we eating “lean finely textured beef” or “pink slime”? Should we “give amnesty to illegal immigrants” or “legalize undocumented workers”?

Ultimately, many language choices are subjective, but some cross the line from preference to deceitfulness. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote about people who use words “in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

Such is the case with purveyors of the term “carbon pollution,” a phrase that conflates carbon dioxide with noxious chemicals like carbon monoxide and black carbon. Carbon dioxide or CO2 is the primary man-made greenhouse gas, but it is also a natural substance that is essential for life. Additionally, it is colorless, odorless, and nontoxic at many times the concentration in earth’s atmosphere. In fact, nature produces considerably more CO2 than man.

Thus, for reasons detailed below, referring to CO2 as “carbon pollution” is highly misleading.

First, the phrase “carbon pollution” is scientifically inaccurate because there are more than ten million different carbon compounds, and the word “carbon” could refer to any of them. Some of the more notorious of these compounds are highly poisonous, such as carbon monoxide (a deadly gas) and black carbon (the primary ingredient of cancerous and mutagenic soot). Using a phrase that does not distinguish between such drastically different substances is a sure way to misinform people.

Second, the term “pollution” conjures up images of smoke pouring from smokestacks and sewage flowing into rivers, which are markedly different from CO2 emissions. Those who use the word “pollution” for CO2 draw no distinction between these scenarios, which again encourages a false impression.

Some of the more prominent users of this verbiage go even further to foster the idea of CO2 as a toxic contaminant. For example, while referring to CO2 as “carbon pollution,” President Obama criticizes “polluters” who “emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air that we breathe.” In stark contrast, the academic book Carbon Dioxide Capture for Storage in Deep Geologic Formations explains that:

Carbon dioxide is generally regarded as a safe and non-toxic, inert gas. It is an essential part of the fundamental biological processes of all living things. It does not cause cancer, affect development or suppress the immune system in humans.

Fueling the deceitful impression advanced by Obama and others, major media outlets, such as Politico, NBC News, and the New York Times, publish articles and commentaries that refer to CO2 as “carbon pollution” with pictures of billowing smokestacks, such as these:

 
The fact is that none of the smoke in these pictures is CO2, because CO2 is invisible except under extreme pressures and temperatures that cause it to transition from a gas to a liquid or solid. Such conditions are far outside the range of anything found in smokestacks.

Some argue that it is acceptable to call CO2 a pollutant because of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that allowed the EPA to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act’s expansive definition of pollution. Such rationale, however, is not a license to use these words in ways that create misleading impressions.

Furthermore, why would anyone who honestly wants to inform people employ an ambiguous and unscientific phrase like “carbon pollution” in favor of a clear and scientifically accurate term like “greenhouse gas”? Only those who simply echo what they hear or those wantonly pushing global warming-related taxes, regulations or similar polices would use such verbiage.

In sum, those who refer to carbon dioxide as “pollution” blur a critical distinction between noxious pollutants and greenhouse gases. Moreover, media outlets that consciously engage in this practice blur a critical distinction between journalism and activism.

Media Smearing Teachers Who Don't Follow the Script to Indoctrinate Our Youth

Hey US science teachers, leave those climate myths alone

As most readers are aware, and stated in posts a few hours after (ClimateGate) CG broke out, Mike’s Nature trick was first uncovered by UC here. [Source]