Maize is predicted to become the world’s most important crop, in terms of human food supply, by 2050 (Pingali, 2001). While the results of our study are limited to one location and one hybrid line, farming practice and crop performance at SoyFACE are typical of the surrounding area and the genotype shares lineage with many other production lines. Champaign County is centrally located in the U.S. Corn Belt and is consistently high yielding (http://www.usda.gov/nass/graphics/county04/crpmap04.htm#corn). So the results of this study should at least relate to the Corn Belt, which generates 40% of global maize production (USDA, 2005). The absence of any photosynthetic, growth, or yield response of maize to elevated [CO2] in 2004 at SoyFACE is inconsistent with some earlier cabinet studies, and suggests that including a direct and consistent CO2 fertilization effect on C4 crop performance is currently a significant source of error in estimating future food security. It appears that elevated [CO2] will only enhance performance by reducing crop water use. Therefore, improvements in A, growth, and yield will only occur if stress is ameliorated in times or places of drought. Unfortunately, the indirect nature of this mechanism, combined with considerable uncertainty regarding future soil water availability (Cubasch et al., 2001), makes predicting future crop performance difficult.
Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by JCH
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by Don Monfort
Thou doesteth protesteth way too mucheth, wee willy. Your are a man of many out dated fluffy words. Did I get that about right? And you claim I don’t even distract you. You would be more convincing if you didn’t spend so much time chasing me around and writing long meandering tirades exposing your silliness for all to see.
We don’t really have to bat this back and forth, wee one. Judith gots two names, gots a job, a famous and influential blog that distracts you to the point of apoplexy, and she gots credibility. You and your little anonymous self-confessed braggart troll, joshie, gots none of the above. You are not the Moderator here, willy. Get over it.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by Peter Lang
Why is it that engineers invariably are able to think so clearly and state what’s most important so concisely?
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by David L. Hagen
The extreme bureaucratic “safety” conscious = extreme risk adverse nuclear “regulatory” agency (aka strangulation agency) is the major cause of the massive rise in costs. The other reason is military nuclear focus rather than starting with the thorium and inheritently safe designs.
The recent generation of inherently safe and smaller distributed nuclear could make power cheaper and faster to deploy if politicians would allow it.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by Peter Lang
David L. Hagen,
Good points.
And this: “nuclear “regulatory” agency (aka strangulation agency)” has been referred to as the “Nuclear Rejection Commission”.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by Peter Lang
Australia’s post 2020 GHG emissions targets should be linked to the availability of cost-competitive, productivity-enhancing, economically-beneficial technologies. The USA and EU could enable this to happen. All countries, including the USA and EU, would benefit if the USA and EU removed the impediments they have imposed that are blocking progress.
Policies that will both reduce the cost of energy and reduce emissions are achievable. However, the USA needs to lead the way. US politics and policies have inflated the cost, through regulatory ratcheting, and retarded development of low emissions energy technologies. EU is nearly as responsible as the US, but is far less capable of fixing the problem. The USA has the keys to solving the global problem.
The current US President, Barack Obama, want’s the world to cut back on GHG emissions and is doing all he can to force other countries to make commitments that would damage their economies. Since Obama wants this, he should allow it to happen in a way that doesn’t damage other economies. The US would also benefit from the productivity increases that polices that reduce the cost of energy would delivers.
One example that could make a substantial contribution to increasing global productivity, increasing economic growth and reducing global GHG emission would be to remove the impediments that are delaying the development of small modular nuclear power plants. The US President can lead the leading contributors and most influential members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to remove the irrational, unjustifiable impediments that are preventing the world from having low-cost nuclear power. Nuclear power is the safest way to generate electricity. It shouldn’t be restrained on the misinformed concerns about safety.
The cost of electricity generated by nuclear power has been inflated by 50 years of irrational, unjustified, legislative and regulatory impediments to low cost nuclear power. Professor Bernard Cohen estimated regulatory ratcheting had increased the cost of nuclear power by a factor of four to 1990. I suspect it has probably increased the cost another factor of two since 1990 – i.e. a total increase of a factor of eight.
Most people want reliable energy at lowest cost. If the US President demands poorer countries and smaller economies reduce their GHG emissions, the USA needs to allow innovation and competition to develop the technologies without progress being impeded by legislation and regulations that are grossly inflating the cost. The US is the world leader in nuclear power technology, has the greatest ability to unleash massive innovation, has the most influence on the other influential members of IAEA and is, in effect, the de facto world regulator or nuclear power designs. The USA can lead the world to make it economically viable to reduce global GHG emissions. The USA needs to make this possible instead of trying to inflict slow growth on the rest of the world while continually impeding economically viable ways to achieve it.
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by Don Monfort
This post really brought the trolls out of the woodwork. They really get agitated when Judith testifies “for the Republicans.” Eat your hearts out little critters the Republicans are in charge of the committees now. At least they didn’t bring in big movie set fans and turn up the AC full blast.
The Hardest Working Troll award for this thread obviously, hands down, by around 97% acclamation goes to…davey the catch-as-catch-can freelance alleged “science” writer.
He would take the trophy by sheer volume alone, but this is the clincher. He has repeatedly defended the usefulness of the climate models by cherrypicking an extreme outlier and pretending that because the chart of some run of GISS E 2 R intersects with observed temps once in a freaking hunnert and 30 years, that proves that climate models are useful. E.g., here he admonishes one of our distinguished and learned denizens:
davey says: “This is yet another misunderstanding climate models, and it’s getting tiring. Climate models cannot guess the future. They don’t know what ENSOs are coming, what AMO/PDO/IPO shifts are coming, what volcanoes are going to erupt, what the Sun will do.
So how can they possibly calculate temperatures over a few decades, where such factors can be important for short-term trends?
Climate models calculate long-term warming, after natural variablity has averaged out to zero. They do a pretty good job:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-giss-model-vs-giss-observed.html”
Go have a look at the chart of that exemplary model and you will see that right at the starting point, in 1880, it plunged into an instant little ice age and then turned around and soared If the modelers had actually been making these projections public back in 1880, they would have been given the tar and feather treatment, post haste. It takes more than a hunnert years for the model to get close to reality, then it diverges, under-projecting warming. What davey doesn’t show you is that running the exemplary model out to at least 2100, blows his disingenuous story out of the water. Recent peer reviewed paper with authors from NASA and other warmest organizations:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014MS000403/pdf
Read the text and pay attention to figures 3 and 4 and table 1 and you will see why davey cherrypicked the very cool-running outlier GISS E2R and scenario RCP2.6 as his champion to compare with 20th temp observations, but ended his chart before things went south. Would an honest science writer pull this kind of crap?
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by Don Monfort
davey, davey
“Climate models calculate long-term warming, after natural variablity has averaged out to zero. They do a pretty good job:”
This is what natural variation looks like:
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by dynam01
Reblogged this on <a href="https://ididntasktobeblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/hearing-presidents-un-climate-pledge/" rel="nofollow">I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog</a>.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by dynam01
Reblogged this on <a href="https://ididntasktobeblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/lafayette-climate-debates/" rel="nofollow">I Didn't Ask To Be a Blog</a>.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by Pooh, Dixie
Did any of the “Pro” debaters mention the inestimable advantage of turning over 80% of the world’s energy supply to global and national political management, allocation and taxation? A brave new world, indeed.
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Comment on Lafayette Climate Debates by Pooh, Dixie
Conceivably, it could also defuse The Population Bomb.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by JCH
And Danny, a miniscule amount compared with what is being claimed.
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Comment on Hearing: President’s UN climate pledge by franktoo
Judith: I wished you had addressed the goal of limiting AGW to 2.0 degC or even 1.5 degC. As best I can tell, the IPCC tells policymakers HOW to limit AGW to 2 degC above pre-industrial, but not WHY. The IPCC provides no scientific or economic RATIONAL for this target. I suspect most policymakers understand little about the 1.5-2.0 degC goal – except that environmental activists have adopted it. Here are some reasons it “must” be discussed.
1) The target is 1.5-2.0 degC above PRE-INDUSTRIAL (1750) – the LIA. No one in their right mind would use the LIA as the starting point for selecting an optimum amount of warming – unless they (religiously) believe that any environmental change caused by man is intolerable – whether it is good or bad for the majority of the people on the planet. Any sensible target should be discussed relative to present climate – climate that people understand and climate closer to optimum. I’d bet that half of the Representatives at your hearing don’t understand the implications of the word “pre-industrial”.
2) The 2 degC goal was chosen without cost-benefit analysis. (History of the 2 C climate target: S Randalls – Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2010.) Despite all of the hype over climate change and extreme weather, economists (all?) believe that the 0.8 degC warming observed in the 20th century was net beneficial for humanity. Therefore roughly half of the maximum ACCEPTABLE amount of AGW represents a change for the better, not the worse. Economists are debating how much warmer it can get before benefits plateau and when net harm to man begins. Why does anyone believe that anything more than 1.5 degC of AGW must be unacceptable when the first 0.8 degC has been beneficial?
3) We don’t know how to meet a 1.5 or 2.0 degC goal. If ECS could be as low as 1.5 degC or as high as 4.5 degC, we can meet this target by total emissions that are as little as 50% or as much as 200% of the IPCC’s central estimate for total emission. Given past emissions, the uncertainty in tolerable future emissions must be even greater, perhaps 30% to 300%. Even that range doesn’t include uncertainty about sinks for carbon dioxide. (The IPCC cheats by using an ensemble of climate models with a much narrower range of ECS and by replacing emission scenarios by RCPs).
4) What is the scientific rational for a 1.5-2.0 degC goal? Some climate scientists believe they have pinpointed the falling CO2 concentrations that initiated the glaciation of Antarctica 30-40 million years ago, the glaciation of Greenland about 10 million years ago and the beginning of ice ages about 2.5 million years ago. From this they deduce that our climate is extremely sensitive to CO2 and that only a narrow range of CO2 concentrations are safe. The problem is that this work assumes that climate change is driven only by changes in CO2 and ignores large uncertainties and much evidence to the contrary. None of this speculative work is currently QUANTITATIVELY endorsed by the IPCC. The SPM for AR5 WG1 merely says:
“Sustained mass loss by ice sheets would cause larger sea level rise, and some part of the mass loss might be irreversible. There is high confidence that sustained warming greater than some threshold would lead to the near-complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet OVER A MILLENNIUM OR MORE, causing a global mean sea level rise of up to 7 m. Current estimates indicate that the threshold is greater than about 1°C (low confidence) but less than about 4°C (medium confidence) global mean warming with respect to pre-industrial. Abrupt and irreversible ice loss from a potential instability of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet in response to climate forcing is possible, but current evidence and understanding is insufficient to make a quantitative assessment.”
The SPM doesn’t tell us that half of the Greenland ice sheet melted during the previous interglacial without the assistance of anthropogenic GHGs. Nor does it tell us that Arctic temperatures far exceeding today’s persisted for two millennia during the Holocene Climate Optimum. Forests grew on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Polar bears and the GIS survived. AR5 Chapter 5 doesn’t even contain the term “Holocene Climate Optimum”, much less discuss its implications.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Willard
> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/207/4434/943.abstract
Yep. A paper from 1980, cited more than 2,500 times. That’s some very solid evidence of that seventies scare, Danny.
A review here:
Things were looking good for explanations of the ice ages in 1975.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2013/10/13/ghosts-of-climates-past-part-three-hays-imbrie-shackleton/
Guessing you must be new here [1].
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Danny Thomas
JCH,
Claimed by whom? Peterson, 2008 says 7 cooling and 42 warming peer reviewed. One by someone at Nasa (guess they’re not considered worthy when it comes to climate in your view?). So some 14%. There was Newsweek, Time, WAPO, and a L. Nimoy teevee show. It was enough to be noticable. So I’ve done my bit. Please show me Newsweek, WAPO, Time and a teevee show on the global warming side prior to 1980. Then we can compare how the information was disseminated. (And I’m still leaving out N.A.S. from 1975)
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Comment on House Hearing scheduled on President’s U.N. climate pledge by patmcguinness
That 97% fallacy gets a lot of reuse, doesn’t it? I mean, we could make the point (again and again) that science doesn’t work by consensus. Or we could make the point that sometimes a ‘science’ paper is garbage, by pointing how full of garbage the Cook et al 97% paper was.
Then again this is the New York Times, and ” the use of false data, emotion-tugging (what, no puppies?), logical fallacy and hyperbolic slander in one brief quote” is par for the course there.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Danny Thomas
Willard,
Same challenge for you as for JCH at end of here: http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/18/week-in-review-science-edition/#comment-695140
(Show me articles in Newsweek, Time, WAPO, and a teevee show on global warming prior to 1980 and then we can discuss comparison of how the information was disseminated vs. global cooling). I’m new here, so I’ve not yet done this for an apples to apples.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Willard
> Same challenge for you […]
Wait until you are able distinguish between an article written in 1970 and in 1980 before issuing challenges, Danny.
Beware your wishes.
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Comment on Week in review – politics and policy edition by Roger Sowell
Peter Lang,
You have been writing disinformation for quite some time about nuclear power plants. The facts are as I have stated. France, as anyone can see, has NOT been followed by any country in producing as great a share of total power. No country follows France, with Ukraine next at only 46 percent, and South Korea at 29 percent of domestic electricity produced by nuclear power. (2011 IEA ). In fact, world-wide, nuclear power produces just 11.7 percent of all electricity (2011 IEA ). If nuclear power was truly a better technology, one would expect that the past 50 years would have observed country after country abandoning coal and natural gas and building nothing but nuclear power plants. Clearly, with only 11 percent or a bit more in world electricity share after 50 years, nuclear power is not the best choice.
Here is the truth about French nuclear plants: after the worldwide increases in crude oil price in the 1970s, France chose nuclear power rather than high-priced imported oil or relying on other countries for natural gas. France has, in the intervening years, subsidized its power prices, reluctantly privatized a portion of the electric industry, developed nuclear technology that it desperately subsidizes to sell to other countries, exports low-balled subsidized power to neighboring countries in an attempt to maintain high nuclear plant operating rates, and recently was the object of an investigation for anti-trust by the EU related to power prices. Clearly, following France in nuclear is not the way to go.
You can read the summary of the 30 articles on Truth About Nuclear Power at
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-30.html
Refute those facts, if you are able.
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