European temperature at WUWT - Finland, the UK, teleconnections and more

I started this article before the hols and although it's a bit stale now, it's a good example of how deniers are nothing if not inconsistent. So here it is.

In another sign that WUWT doesn't know its ups from its downs, whether it's warming or cooling, there were two articles that pretty well contradicted each other.

• In the first article, Anthony Watts reckons that all the thermometers in Finland must be wrong because they show a "step change" in temperature from the late 1980s.
• In the second article, Paul Homewood talks about the "sharp rise" in UK temperatures from the 1980s as something that "everyone knows".

The UK isn't really all that far from Finland, and the way the wind blows I expect they'd both often be influenced by the same weather patterns - though Finland can get quite a bit colder. So why would Anthony figure that Finland can't be getting any warmer while he posts an article on the very next day assuming that "everyone knows" that the UK has got a lot warmer?

Source: Google Maps

Fizzy denier weirdness upwelling at WUWT

This is just a little teaser, ahead of another article in the works, which I plan to finish sooner rather than later - but no promises.

This comment was seen today under a video which in part is about how upwelling waters are more acidic than surface waters in the ocean (which is true, they are). What I'll leave you to chew on is the magical thinking, the leaps of illogic that is so typical of WUWT. You don't need to know anything about ocean science or climate science to see how wrong it is. All you need is some high school chemistry and physics. Bart wrote:

November 6, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Very interesting. This increase in upwelling may be what is driving atmospheric CO2 increase, whose rate of change is manifestly a temperature modulated process, and not substantially affected by human release of latent CO2 locked away in fossil fuels.

If I'm reading him correctly (and there's no guarantee), Bart thinks that the CO2 from burning hydrocarbons disappears out of the air (and sea) by magic and is replaced by carbon brought up from the depths of the ocean, which is turned into carbon dioxide and expelled into the air.

Viv Forbes gets a response to his silly letter to some editor at WUWT

Today Anthony Watts posted a silly substance-free "letter to the Editor" by director of Stanmore Coal Viv Forbes. I've archived here the WUWT article. I couldn't see that any editor, other than the WUWT editor, received or posted the letter. (Though some editors are not at all discerning when it comes to publishing letters.)

Anyway, the editor at WUWT saw fit to post it. And it drew a response from James Abbott, which the WUWT mods allowed through the WUWT firewall. (The WUWT firewall is intended to filter out any comments from people who accept science. Every now and then a normal person will slip through the cracks.)

Below is Viv's letter and I've interspersed the response from James Abbott, and added a few of my own. Viv's nonsense is in blue italics, James responses are in black bold.

Don't ditch the 2°C target

Today at WUWT (archived here) Anthony Watts is delighted to read a comment at Nature from David G. Victor & Charles F. Kennel, who are arguing that the 2°C target be replaced with different and a more complicated set of indicators. I don't agree.

Ditching a target because it seems difficult is a no-no in planning unless the target is clearly wrong. This one isn't. The problem with ditching an agreed target is that it gives people an excuse to water it down. Rather than ditch the target, there should be a greater urgency applied to achieving it. If we fail, then we will need to know by how much we've failed and the consequences of that failure.

I don't mind adding another target, like the one that was described in the IPCC AR5 WG1 report - a cumulative carbon emission budget. However I think the Nature article is muddled and its suggestions are not all that useful.

Charting the depths of CO2 ignorance at WUWT

Am I imagining it or is WUWT getting more dismal by the day, without the light relief of articles like "OMG it's insects" and "Russian steampipes caused global warming"?

Seems to me that Anthony is really dumbing down his blog. He hasn't been able to attract many "guest essayists" and is having to write more himself. He has little imagination though so WUWT is becoming really dull.

Today he's writing about the fact that atmospheric CO2 keeps going up - and ever faster. He put up his ridiculous chart again (archived here). Is it going to become his new trademark? The WUWT cherry pick? He first displayed it only a few days ago. It's this one that I mocked the other day by comparing it with another random line between two points:

Data source: Wood for Trees Charts: WUWT and HotWhopper

Anthony reckons there's been no warming since 1995 but that's because he doesn't know how to read a temperature chart. Have a look again at the above chart. It's monthly, so there's a lot of noise. Still it's not hard to see that at the left of the chart many more months have much lower temperatures than to the right of the chart. And if you're still having trouble, look at the bottom axis. The left hand of the chart where the temperatures are lower is the mid 1990s. The right hand side is closer to today. That means that the surface temperature is rising still.

I might as well show the annual chart as well, so you can see it more clearly:

Data source: NASA GISTemp

What else? Well Anthony is leaving out the oceans, which absorb 90% of the extra heat. Here's a chart that shows this. It's from a previous article from when deniers decided that it hadn't warmed since 1996.

Data source: NOAA/NODC

James McCown and WUWT reject CO2 science and the greenhouse effect

Anthony Watts works too hard to make sure people know that WUWT peddles pseudo-science crap. He doesn't have to go overboard like he does. Anyone who has heard of denier blogs knows that his is the most favoured utter nutter blog on the internet. He boasts about it. Every now and then he claims to accept the science of the greenhouse effect, but you'd not know it. He often puts up articles disputing the greenhouse effect, and many of his "guests" and probably most of his most ardent fans are stuck in greenhouse effect denial.

Today at WUWT there was another "guest essay" by someone called James McCown. James has a bee in his bonnet about atmospheric carbon dioxide. I've written before about an article he wrote.

James is a one-man band who has a website about his consulting business in oil and gas, and real estate, among other things. When he's not rejecting science, he spends his spare time (of which I'll bet he has a lot) writing Android apps, which he offers for free. He also tries to sell his services as an "expert witness". Whatever, it's clear that his many self-declared talents do not include climate science or any of the physical sciences.

How James McCown disputes basic chemistry

What I don't understand is why Anthony Watts gives idiots like this chap a platform. I mean he comes up with the silliest things. Last time he was arguing that burning fossil fuels doesn't produce carbon dioxide. For example, with one of the simplest hydrocarbons, methane:

CH₄ + 2O₂ → 2H₂O + CO₂ + energy

James wrote:

This leads me to believe that if the CO2 concentration is accurately measured by Etheridge et al (1996), then it is more likely the result of a natural process than from industrial sources.

Natural processes? Is he saying that burning hydrocarbons doesn't produce CO2?

How James McCown disputes basic physics

Today he's just as nutty, trying to argue that atmospheric CO2 isn't long-lasting in the atmosphere and isn't well-mixed. That's contrary to every bit of science on the subject for the past goodness knows how many decades. It's not as if this is something that's being debated in science. This is basic, well-founded knowledge that dates back years and years.

Here is a chart of CO2 as analysed at Law Dome in Antarctica, from Etheridge and co, just for the period from 1840 to 1969. (There are more charts below).

Data source: NOAA

You can see that it's risen since 1840, without any sharp fluctuations.

James doesn't like it. He even dug up a ridiculous chart from somewhere or other (a chap called Beck in the so-called "journal" Energy & Environment), which claims that atmospheric CO2 in the 1830s was as high as it was in the 1990s. It has all sorts of wild swings and is not just way off base, there is no plausible mechanism by which such swings could be explained.

Source: WUWT

Eli Rabett has the story. Georg Hoffmann at RealClimate wrote about it too. And there are other rebuttals, from CO2 guru, Ralph Keeling and Harro A.J. Meijer if that doesn't satisfy you.

James doesn't know much about the data sampling of CO2. He got some of it partly right, (though it's not just flask measurements), saying:

The usual sources of atmospheric CO2 concentration data, beginning with 1958, are flask measurements from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from observatories at Mauna Loa, Antarctica, and elsewhere. 

Then he veered off into ignoramus land, writing:

These have been sampled on a monthly basis, and sometimes more frequently, and thus provide a good level of temporal accuracy for use in comparing annual average CO2 concentrations with annual global average temperatures.

Monitoring atmospheric CO2

Samples aren't just taken once a month. For example, the monitoring at Mauna Loa is continuous, with readings only interrupted by calibrations.

You can read about the history Charles (Dave) David Keeling and his CO2 monitoring here. You can read about the current process for monitoring atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa here.  This CSIRO page describes what happens at Cape Grim in Tasmania.

Here is a map showing all the places around the world that contribute to the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (WDCGG). Click to view it larger, or go to the source here.

Distribution of the fixed stations that contribute data to the WDCGG.   The symbol " • " denotes that the data from the station has been updated in the last 365 days

CO2 from Law Dome, Antarctica

James is all hot and bothered about the Law Dome data, compiled by Etheridge and co back in the 1990s. Here is a chart from the CSIRO website, showing Law Dome data together with data from Cape Grim:

James is upset because he says:

Due to the issues of diffusive mixing and gradual bubble closure, each of these figures give us only an estimate of the average CO2 concentration over a period that may be 15 years or more. If the distribution of the air age is symmetric about these mean air ages, the estimate of 310.5 ppm from the DE08 core for 1938 could include air from as early as 1930 and as late as 1946.

Umm, even if it did, looking at the Table 4 in Etheridge et al (1996), the range would be from 305.2 ppm (1929) and 311.4 ppm (1948). And comparing the three cores, the CO2 around that period was found to be 310.5 in 1938 (DE08), 310.5 in 1940 (DE08-2) and 309.2 in 1939 (DSS). Not much between them is there.

The dating accuracy of the ice core samples was said to be +/- two years at 1805 and +/- ten years at 1350 AD. The precision of the analysis of the air samples was to 0.2 ppm. This is what is written about the Law Dome analyses for the period 1006 A.D.-1978 A.D:

The CO2 records presented here are derived from three ice cores obtained at Law Dome, East Antarctica from 1987 to 1993. The Law Dome site satisfies many of the desirable characteristics of an ideal ice core site for atmospheric CO2 reconstructions including negligible melting of the ice sheet surface, low concentrations of impurities, regular stratigraphic layering undisturbed at the surface by wind or at depth by ice flow, and high snow accumulation rate. ...

...The precision of analysis of the Law Dome ice core air samples was 0.2 ppm. For greater details on the experimental techniques used on the DE08, DE08-2, and DSS ice cores, please refer to Etheridge et al. (1996).

The ice cores were dated by counting the annual layers in oxygen isotope ratio (δ18O in H2O), ice electroconductivity measurements (ECM), and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) concentrations. For these three parameters, each core displayed clear, well-preserved seasonal cycles allowing a dating accuracy of ±2 years at 1805 A.D. for the three cores and ±10 years at 1350 A.D. for DSS.

And from the paper, variations within a time scale less than ten years would have been difficult to pick up:

It is possible that other CO2 changes of similar magnitude occurred in the past but with such short duration that even the Law Dome ice did not record them. However, it is unlikely that such changes would be recorded in ice cores with still higher accumulation rate than DE08 and DE08-2 (even if sites could be found without significant surface melting), because the diffusion of air through the firn will significantly smooth any variations shorter than about 10 years. The DE08 cores may be at the upper limit of air age resolution for ice cores. 

But so what? Exactly. I really don't know what James is going on about. He spends most of his article talking about cointegration tests. But I think that's just waffle to try to make his main point, which is to question the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.

In other words, he goes to great lengths to reject the greenhouse effect.

Just another denier nutter.

CO2 is rising too quickly

The bottom line is that CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas and once it gets into the air stays there for a very long time. Look at the CSIRO chart above and tell me how much it matters whether the estimate for 1938 should be 308 ppm or 312 ppm. What is a concern is that atmospheric CO2 broke through 400 ppm this year.

Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USCD

From the WUWT comments

James' silly article had the deniers salivating, particularly the greenhouse effect deniers.

Latitude thinks that James got his historic data from someone other than scientists, who he reckons have ignored it, contrary to the information that James himself provided (lots of references to studies that looked at historic CO2 levels from the dim distant past). What a nutter.

August 29, 2014 at 10:21 am
James, thank you
CO2 levels are the root of the entire global warming hoodoo…and people have been completely fooled into believing it
CO2 history has been almost completely ignored…and it’s the biggest h o a x of them all

Solomon Green doesn't know that CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas or that the data is not sparse.

August 29, 2014 at 11:00 am
I have seen several postings and/or papers discrediting Ernst-Georg Beck but I had not realised that the pre 1958 data was so sparse. If that is the best data available it is very difficult to see that any supposed correlation between CO2 and temperature prior to 1958 can be anything but an act of faith.

I would only disagree with one word in James McCowan’s essay. In the sentence “The results from the tests of the pre-1958 data are almost certainly spurious” I think that he has shown that the words “almost” is not necessary.

TheLastDemocrat wrote a very long comment that shows he doesn't accept the physics of the greenhouse effect. Which only goes to show he's one of the 8% Dismissives and a member of the scientific illiterati.

August 29, 2014 at 11:17 am (excerpts)
Great post.

...ANY coincident variable that dramatically goes from zero at baseline to its highest values at the end of the time span will have relatively powerful mathematical relation with temp.
We could plug in the human population, or the number of computers, etc., and would get a similar result...

...There are many other human-activity-related measures that wold show up as significantly predictive. They only have to have their lower value at the beginning of the timeline, and highest value at the end...

 john robertson is a conspiracy theorist who doesn't know that the world is getting hotter.

August 29, 2014 at 11:48 am
Theory?
Not by empirical standards.
The Magic Gas Meme is either not falsifiable or it is long dead.
As temperature records from 1970 alone destroy it.
But then facts never did matter in the Great Cause, ™ Team IPCC.
So far all we have is weak speculation, that an increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will cause a warmer planet.
Right now, in the incredibly short time we have data for, looks like CO2 = Cooler .
But we do not have sufficient data to say any more than; “Could be, couldn’t say for sure”.
I believe I can make a better case, that hysterical humans produce garage in the place of science.

Here are some temperature records for john robertson, not just from 1970.

Data source: NASA GISS

---

Etheridge, D. M., L. P. Steele, R. L. Langenfelds, R. J. Francey, J‐M. Barnola, and V. I. Morgan. "Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 101, no. D2 (1996): 4115-4128.

Ed Hoskins' pseudo-science claptrap brings out all the nutters at WUWT

Ed Hoskins is a science disinformer who pops up from time to time at WUWT. He's tried a few different things out to tempt deniers. This time he catches a big fish, as far as WUWT goes, snaffling Steven Mosher, That might surprise some people - not me though. A leopard doesn't change it's spots.

This time Ed Hoskins writes a lot of wrong about carbon dioxide (archived here). In the past, he's trotted out "an ice age cometh" and more wrong about carbon dioxide. He can't make up his mind between "an ice age cometh", "it's not happening" and "it won't be bad".

Increasing CO2 raises surface temperature

According to the IPCC, doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial times will raise global surface temperature from between 1.5°C and 4.5°C. Doubling it again will raise it from between 3°C and 9°C. If the latter, it will mean that a lot of Earth becomes uninhabitable because it will be hotter than mammals (like humans) can physiologically tolerate. Here is a chart from the IPCC showing cumulative emissions and the impact on global temperature. Click to see it larger.

Figure SPM.10 from IPCC AR5 WG1 with my annotation

About the logarithmic relationship of CO2

Before going any further, it will pay to go back to the logarithmic relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global surface temperature. In short, what it means is that for every doubling of atmospheric CO2, the surface temperature will rise by the same fixed amount, between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, probably by around 3°C over the medium term (centuries). Many deniers think it means that for every doubling of CO2, temperature will rise much less, but that's wrong. It will go up by roughly the same amount when CO2 doubles (at foreseeable levels). The typical science denier doesn't do maths.

Ed Hoskins' pseudo-scientific claptrap

Ed's article is all over the place like a dog's breakfast, but his main very wrong message is that CO2 can rise to 1000 ppm without any bad consequences. That's just not so.

Ed's argument is that because the effect of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic, it will only have a tiny impact as it increases. The first part is true. The relationship is logarithmic. However the second part is relative. What might seem a "tiny impact" for, say, a diurnal temperature variation would have an enormous impact if it were an increase in average surface temperature over the entire world. From our perspective, the impact on climate and ocean acidification and rising sea levels will be hugely damaging as more and more CO2 is emitted.

400ppm CO2 and Oh Dear! Another humungous blunderous blunder by Anthony Watts

Update: see below for how Anthony shifts the blame!

---

A short while ago Wondering Willis Eschenbach wrote about Anthony Watts at WUWT:

So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job.

Anthony Watts seems to agree that it's not his job to see if articles have any merit or not. And Willis is on the ball when he says that Anthony couldn't tell anyway.

Anthony Watts - big, huge, spectacular fail in climate 101

There's another example of that today (archived here). Anthony copied and pasted an article from another blog, which was itself taken from yet a third blog. (Deniers are into recycling in a big way.)  His claim this time is encapsulated in his headline:

EPA document supports ~3% of atmospheric carbon dioxide is attributable to human sources

Three per cent? 3%? WRONG - it's 30%!

Remember, Anthony Watts has been blogging about climate science or weather for more than seven years now. To not know that human activity has added more than 40% to atmospheric CO2 is amazing, even for someone as blockheaded as Anthony Watts. It makes you realise that Willis Eschenbach has hit the nail on the head. Anthony Watts doesn't know the first thing about climate. [Corrected phrasing/arithmetic, thanks Robert.]

Hitting rock bottom at WUWT: OMG it's insects - Ronald D Voisin is ba-a-a-a-ck!

WUWT this week has surely hit rock bottom. It's slithered from the dopey to the absurd.

What is wrong with Anthony Watts? Have his half-coherent fake sceptics deserted him? Has he taken Wondering Willis Eschenbach's words to heart? Has the reality of global warming become so apparent that he's decided to give up on the ideological deniers and target his blog at the wingnuts?

It probably started with the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park, David Evans, and his Force X and the notch. If you thought that was weird enough, since then WUWT's been on a slippery slope to utter nuttery, including Tim Ball and his paranoid fantasies, Wondering Willis Eschenbach and his dismal skirmishes with Economics 101, Willis again and his scathing attack on Anthony Watts and WUWT, Roy Spencer PhD admitting he knows virtually nothing at all about climate science, then Anthony Watts failing junior high school chemistry.

Now Anthony's resurrected Ronald D. Voisin, of OMG it's insects fame (archived here, latest update here). You may recall he suggested we kill off mammals to help reduce CO2. You might also recall his central core nuclear reactor "theory" of climate.

This time Ronald decides, quite arbitrarily, that the oceans are a net emitter of CO2. By implication he's rejecting the notion that burning fossil fuels produces CO2 (although he does list it in a table), that the pH of oceans is dropping. He reckons he's done his sums, but he's neglected to factor in the pluses and minuses. If not for human activities like burning fossil fuels and deforestation, the amount of CO2 absorbed by natural sources (CO2 sinks) would be balanced by the amount of CO2 emitted from CO2 sources.

Denier weirdness: On cutting CO2 emissions - Anthony Watts is a stubby short of a six pack

Sometimes Anthony Watts appears to be thick as a plank, a stubby short of a six-pack, a screw loose (archived here).  He thinks that the following are contradictory:

• Currently proposed CO2 emission cuts won't be enough to limit global warming to 2°C
• The only way to limit global warming is to cut CO2 emissions.

The statements are not contradictory. They are different aspects of the same thing. The very same message that we've been told for something like fifty years or more.

It's perfectly clear to a clear thinker. It should be perfectly clear even to someone like Anthony Watts, who does not excel at clear thinking (to put it mildly).

Ignorant WUWT-ers suffer CO2 phobia going back 900,000 years

Today Anthony Watts (archived here) copied and pasted the press release from a study I wrote about last week. It was about the paper by Leopoldo Pena and Steven Goldstein on what caused the ice ages to change around a million years ago. The paper was presenting an explanation of the 100,000 year glacial cycle. You can read about it here or at ScienceDaily.com.

I was struck by the intense CO2 phobia that commenters at WUWT suffer from. They obviously don't understand the carbon cycle or the role of carbon dioxide in climate. Nor do they understand the CO2/ocean interaction. A lot of them have never heard of Milanković cycles (and extensions to his theory). Not that I claim expertise or specialist knowledge, but the basics of all these are straightforward and not all that difficult to comprehend. (I did a search at WUWT for Milanković cycles and it's pretty clear why the people who don't venture beyond WUWT don't know anything about the subject.)

(If you're on the home page, click "read more" to find out more about the paper and see the reaction at WUWT.)

WUWT claim? CO2 is NOT plant food. How WUWT rejects chemistry, biology and photosynthesis

Anthony Watts today posted an article on his blog rejecting chemistry, biology and photosynthesis (archived here). The article was written by WUWT "guest" essayist, James McCown, who wrote:

...if the CO2 concentration is accurately measured by Etheridge et al (1996), then it is more likely the result of a natural process than from industrial sources.

James McCown is said to be an "economist with the Toltec Group, an economic consulting practice in Oklahoma and has  a PhD in economics from Ohio State." It looks as if he is the Toltec Group. I'd say he is the sum total of the Toltec Group, which from its website is mainly interested in oil and gas (and flogging a free android app). I'd not recommend commissioning him to do any research relating to climate (or economics).

Most scientists will agree that most of the CO2 concentration changes of the past 1000 years as reported by Etheridge et al way back in 1996 would have been the result of natural processes rather than from industrial sources. The main contribution from industrial sources would have been from the industrial era, since the 1700s. Most of the changes from the several centuries prior to that would have been from natural sources, with only small changes arising from human activities such as deforestation and agriculture. So that's nothing new.

However I don't think that's what James McCown meant. I believe he was trying to argue that plants don't use CO2 in photosynthesis and that burning fossil fuels doesn't release carbon dioxide. It seems to me that he's rejecting plant biochemistry (photosynthesis) as well as chemistry (the reaction of burning hydrocarbons).  What he seems to be saying is that the recent hike in atmospheric CO2 wasn't added by humans.

I put together a chart based on these data from Lüthi et al 2009, just averaging the CO2 over each 10,000 years of the past 800,000 years and adding what's happened in the past 150 years, since we've been burning up fossil fuels and chopping down trees at a greater pace than ever:

Data source: Lüthi et al (2008)

Atmospheric CO2 oscillated between around 180 ppm and 280 ppm over the past 800,000 years as Earth cooled and warmed. It's only in recent decades that it's gone above 300 ppm and has now shot up to 400 ppm. Burning gigantic amounts of fossil fuels is the main reason for this. James hasn't thought it through when he writes: "it is more likely the result of a natural process than from industrial sources". In fact he doesn't even indicate what "natural process" could possibly cause such a stupendously huge amount of CO2 to get into the air all of a sudden.

Most of the WUWT article was about a paper and a comment on the paper. The first paper was by Michael Beenstock and colleagues, published in November 2012.  It was one of those statistical analyses that pop up from time to time wherein deniers try to prove that AGW doesn't exist or is minimal. The paper looks to have been an "it's the sun" claim, with the opening para in the Discussion section being (my bold):

We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period. This key result is shown graphically in Fig. 3 where the vertical axis measures the component of global temperature that is unexplained by solar irradiance according to our estimates. In panel a the horizontal axis measures the anomaly in the anthropogenic trend when the latter is derived from forcings of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. In panel b the horizontal axis measures this anthropogenic anomaly when apart from these greenhouse gas forcings, it includes tropospheric aerosols and black carbon. Panels a and b both show that there is no relationship between temperature and the anthropogenic anomaly, once the warming effect of solar irradiance is taken into consideration.

The Beenstock paper is pretty well all statistics and econometrics which is beyond my expertise. It wasn't based on climate science. It didn't get much attention, being cited only 14 times so far (according to Google Scholar), with most citations being either refutations mixed with the occasional citation from other science deniers (eg Willie Soon).  At WUWT James is trying to defend the paper against one of the papers that pointed out its flaws, by Pretis and Hendry - who took it on from an econometric perspective. A fight fire with fire approach.

Michael Beenstock has only tackled global warming in one other paper that I found, and that was about tide gauges. I gather he's a climate science denier whose own field isn't climate science but economics.

The comment on the paper was by two economists, F. Pretis and D. F. Hendry, who argued there were errors in the Beenstock paper, which they discuss under six main headings. Anyway, that's enough of that. This HW article isn't about the merits or otherwise of the different papers. The papers themselves rely on technical analysis which is beyond my expertise and they aren't really about climate science, they are about statistics/econometrics. I just thought it was mildly interesting that WUWT has another article rejecting basic science. In this case, rejecting chemistry and biology.

From the WUWT comments

One of the commenters at WUWT goes even further and disputes the denier meme that "CO2 is plant food". Doug Proctor says (extract):

June 24, 2014 at 11:15 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve

Have a look at the details of the Keeling CO2 curve. There is a very odd SINGLE cycle to the rise and fall during the year. The peak is in late April, and the lowest level, in end September, beginning October. The annual rise is the difference between the rise and fall, of course, and attributed to power-plant, fossil fuel use. The cycle is attributed to “natural causes”. Yet what processes start net CO2 production in September and end net production in May? And why only one?

What processes indeed!

---

Beenstock, Michael, Yaniv Reingewertz, and Nathan Paldor. "Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming." Earth System Dynamics 3, no. 2 (2012): 173-188. doi:10.5194/esd-3-173-2012

Pretis, F., and D. F. Hendry. "Comment on" Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming" by Beenstock et al.(2012)–some hazards in econometric modelling of climate change." Earth System Dynamics 4, no. 2 (2013): 375-384. doi:10.5194/esd-4-375-2013

Etheridge, D. M., L. P. Steele, R. L. Langenfelds, R. J. Francey, J‐M. Barnola, and V. I. Morgan. "Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 101, no. D2 (1996): 4115-4128. DOI: 10.1029/95JD03410

Lüthi, Dieter, Martine Le Floch, Bernhard Bereiter, Thomas Blunier, Jean-Marc Barnola, Urs Siegenthaler, Dominique Raynaud et al. "High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000–800,000 years before present." Nature 453, no. 7193 (2008): 379-382. doi:10.1038/nature06949

"Expert" David Legates tells US Senate Committee that CO2 is animal food

This'll tickle your funny bone. Anthony Watts has been privileged with an advance copy of testimony to a US Senate Committee (archived here, with the pdf file of the testimony copied here). It probably makes him feel so important to have a copy before it's presented. (Surely that's frowned upon.) Some members of the US Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works obviously wanted to have a little fun at the expense of the US taxpayers, so they called up a chap by the name of David Legates to testify.

David has impressive credentials. He says:

I am a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and I served as the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011. I also am an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Statistics and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering Program. I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Geography, a M.S. in Geography, and a Ph.D. in Climatology, all from the University of Delaware

I checked because I found it almost impossible to credit that a university would employ a ratbag like David Legates. It does - but he doesn't have any profile there :(

CO2 is animal food!

I started reading his testimony but had to stop on page two when I got to this bit:

Considering that CO2 is food for plants and animals...

Yep, you read that right. Here it is in black and white and grey - see page two:

David Legates isn't just running the normal denier spiel that "CO2 is plant food". Now it's animal food, too. Do you reckon he feeds his livestock CO2? Would he feed it to them frozen, you know, slabs of dry ice which would look just like salt licks? Surely not. Do their tongues stick to the CO2 when they try to lick it?

David Legates might call himself a climatologist, but he's a science denying climatologist. He has graced this blog before - here and here. Oh, and he's a member of the Cornwall Alliance cult.

Pity David's animals. Pity the poor Delawarians :(

CO2 Downunder: The greening of Anthony Watts and his greenhouse effect deniers

Update -- see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up (archived here) about a new paper in Nature, except he doesn't know what he's writing about (as usual). His headline was:

Unsettled science: New study challenges the consensus on CO2 regulation – modeled CO2 projections exaggerated

No, Anthony. Modeled CO2 projections aren't exaggerated.

WUWT conspiracy nutters thrive with high CO2

Anthony's opening line was not only wrong, it was pure conspiracy ideation:

I’m really quite surprised to find this paper in Nature, especially when it makes claims so counter to the consensus that model projections are essentially a map of the future climate.

That's feeding the paranoia of the nutters at WUWT, who think that journals filter out science that doesn't support a consensus.  The opposite is true. Journals, particularly high profile journals like Nature, prefer papers that buck the consensus, that make headlines, that help promote the journal.  This paper doesn't buck any consensus in any real way. Instead it probes the detail and adds more knowledge.

Fact is, Anthony is getting his (dis)information from another denier website. Not a wise thing to do if you are interested in science, which Anthony isn't. He's a science disinformer so naturally rather than interpret the science, he interprets interpretations of science disinformers :)

Floods led to massive plant growth in semi-arid regions

Anthony got the paper right up to a point. What the large team of researchers found was that the record floods in Australia boosted vegetation so much that it sucked up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.  As the abstract states (my paras and bold italics):

We use a terrestrial biogeochemical model, atmospheric carbon dioxide inversion and global carbon budget accounting methods to investigate the evolution of the terrestrial carbon sink over the past 30 years, with a focus on the underlying mechanisms responsible for the exceptionally large land carbon sink reported in 2011 (ref. 2). 

Here we show that our three terrestrial carbon sink estimates are in good agreement and support the finding of a 2011 record land carbon sink. Surprisingly, we find that the global carbon sink anomaly was driven by growth of semi-arid vegetation in the Southern Hemisphere, with almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems, where prevalent La Niña conditions caused up to six consecutive seasons of increased precipitation.

In addition, since 1981, a six per cent expansion of vegetation cover over Australia was associated with a fourfold increase in the sensitivity of continental net carbon uptake to precipitation.

Our findings suggest that the higher turnover rates of carbon pools in semi-arid biomes are an increasingly important driver of global carbon cycle inter-annual variability and that tropical rainforests may become less relevant drivers in the future. More research is needed to identify to what extent the carbon stocks accumulated during wet years are vulnerable to rapid decomposition or loss through fire in subsequent years.

What happened in Australia

Australia's long term average precipitation over the period 1900 to 2009 was 453 mm. In 2010 it was 703 mm and in 2011 it was 708 mm. That's a lot more rain. That made those two years combined the wettest since records began in 1900 and is attributed to La Niña, which also brought above average rain to southern Africa and northern South America. The rain was extra heavy, even for La Niña, because of global warming. The seas are hotter so more water is evaporating.  As reported at The Conversation, GRACE satellites estimated a decrease in ocean water mass of 1.8 trillion tonnes, with water shifted from the oceans to land. Sea levels dropped by a massive 5 mm.

Here is an illustration of what happened to the vegetation:

Modelled carbon uptake of the Australian landscape in December 2009 (before) compared with the start of the big wet in December 2010 (after). Adapted from Source: The Conversation.

Semi-arid regions vs tropical rainforests as carbon sinks

Thing is, conventional wisdom holds that it's tropical rainforests that are the most important carbon sink and will continue to be so. However this new research shows that semi-arid regions may become increasingly important as carbon sinks if events such as those described above occur more often. Semi-arid regions represent around 40% of the world's land surface.

A roller coaster of carbon shifts?

Australia as you know is also prone to drought and bushfires. Australia is the second driest continent on earth, after Antarctica. Any person who lives up the bush will tell you that the worst fire risk comes after a "good season". Lush vegetation dries out and fires take hold. What that does is unleash all that carbon that's been taken up by the extra growth and returns it to the atmosphere.

During the big wet, there weren't so many fires. It wasn't just Queensland that got wet, half of my own home state was under water for much of the 2011 summer. Much of Central Australia was virtually a giant lake. Western Australia had huge floods as well. The authors state that fire emissions were suppressed by about 30%, which "contributed even further to the continent's greening".

The good news of this carbon sink is tempered by the bad. In wet seasons there will probably continue to be a lot more carbon stored in new vegetation and in the soil. However with the projected climate change across much of Australia, it's likely that there will be more droughts and fires, which will result in all that carbon going back into the atmosphere. It won't stay locked up.

The interesting thing buried in the detail of the article at The Conversation, is that Australia has been greening more since the 1980s, not all with a good outcome (note the expansion of invasive species). The authors write:

In addition to the unprecedented vegetation greening of Australia during 2010 and 2011, we also observe a greening trend over the continent since 1980s, particularly during the months of the Australian autumn (March, April, and May).

That has happened for a number of reasons, including increased continental rainfall over the past few decades; plants growing in an atmosphere with increasing carbon dioxide using water more efficiently; and changes in land management such as fire suppression, expansion of invasive species, and changes in livestock grazing that have led to more woodland.

There have been previous studies that show that the increased carbon dioxide in the air is leading to more growth in Australia's native flora (as elsewhere in the world), particular in the arid regions. I wrote about this research on my slumbering Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera blog.

Where Anthony Watts gets it wrong - a short-lived sink

Of course Anthony Watts misrepresents the science. He isn't even aware of the paper itself. He only linked to an article in Nature about the paper calling it "a new paper". And he missed out completely on showing the article in The Conversation by two of the paper's authors.

Anthony wrote (my bold italics):

The authors find links between the land CO2 sink in these semi-arid ecosystems “are currently missing from many major climate models.” In addition, they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated.

Obviously Anthony is wrong when he claims that land sinks are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, otherwise atmospheric CO2 wouldn't be above 400 ppm or rising at 3 ppm a year, like it is. It's simple arithmetic. While it is quite possible/probable that some climate models don't provide for CO2 sinks in semi-arid regions during big wets like the recent ones in Australia, I don't know where Anthony got his bit about exaggeration from either. It's not in the page he published from the Nature article about the paper (by Daniel B. Metcalfe). He probably got it from his denier blog source or maybe he just made it up. What the authors say at the Conversation is that the large uptake of carbon in 2011 was likely short-lived, because there was a rapid decline in the sink strength in 2012. So that suggests that Anthony is wrong as usual.

More volatility in CO2 levels

The ramifications of the research are that there is likely to be a lot more volatility in CO2 levels. Vegetation in semi-arid regions isn't like that in tropical rainforests.  The latter store carbon in hardwoods, which can lock it up for centuries. By contrast, in semi-arid regions carbon is stored in grasses and shrubs, which are relatively short-lived and prone to fire and drought, which quickly releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.  The authors say:

Increasingly, semi-arid regions are driving variability in how much carbon dioxide remains in the Earth’s atmosphere each year. And that has major implications for the long-term, including whether future climate change will slow down or accelerate further.

There's not very much information about the carbon budget in arid and semi-arid regions and I expect this research will lead to more. It could be that climate change will accelerate a lot, or proceed more slowly. I won't be betting on the latter until there's a lot more information.

Update

There is an excellent FAQ on this topic, prepared by the researchers.

From the WUWT comments

As usual, deniers at WUWT only like stuff that they think supports their ideology. Being fake sceptics, they don't check facts for themselves.  Also, the greenhouse effect deniers are out in force, suggesting that Anthony is rapidly losing faith with more rational, intelligent fake sceptics (if there is such a beast). Maybe Anthony's readership is shrinking to the utter nutters:

RayG is a greenhouse effect denier who refuses to read science. He stopped reading at the first hurdle, and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:14 am
I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

hunter is another greenhouse effect denier and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:18 am
While the assertion that CO2 is *the* climate thermostat is dubious, at least this article is exploring one of the significant failings of the current CO2 obsession.

Latitude says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:23 am
Well, I mean really….
who was stupid enough in the first place to think an additional 2 ppm/yr would overwhelm the system

Dave says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:41 am
RayG says: I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

Obama said it’s a fact. So it’s gotta be true, right? 

Londo says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:43 am
“I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.”

Perhaps that was the price to pay to get the paper through toll gate known as peer review. If there is one unsupported claim that you probably can publish in any climate journal that’s probably it.

Rhoda R says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:44 am
RayG says:
Ray, it may be that that statement was the only way that this study could have been published. I suspect that if the man-made, developed countries driver for C02 is shot down there will be much less interest in government funding of AGW research. 

Michael Gersh isn't just a greenhouse effect denier, he doesn't even accept basic chemistry, that burning hydrocarbon releases CO2 and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:48 am
As many of the actual scientists who have been espousing the “CO2 as Devil” meme walk away from the bad science, this paper tries to reveal that humanity may not even be the cause of higher CO2 concentrations. Those to whom Warmism is a religion will pretend not to notice.

Eliza is hopeful that it's one of the nails in the coffin and figures if climate science gets the chop then the world will magically stop warming. She says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:23 pm
Its probably a discrete “first” way out for NATURE so none of the big AGW shots notice. Its a climb down and we will be seeing more and more of this until the “norm” will in fact be the skeptic position, The whole AGW scam will only completely disappear when the funding dries out. For example, it is highly unlikely that Labor if they win the next election in Australia will pick it up again since Abbot has basically cut off all funding for AGW research and propaganda.

José Tomás says:

May 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Nature and other papers have obviously noticed that CAGW has no future (they are not idiots), but you cannot backtrack and save face at the same time.
So, expect lip service paid to CAGW for a long time, even while published articles go in the opposite direction. 

pokerguy says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:10 am
Can’t speak to the particulars, but seemingly excellent news that this paper has seen the light of day in the current repressive atmosphere. Is it possible things are changing a bit?

agfosterjr says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:52 pm
We see little mention of the Andean Altiplano, where possibly the growth of some species is limited more by CO2 scarcity (partial pressure) than by temperature or rainfall. Current interpretation of mud cores from Lake Titicaca indicates no certain history of Holocene forestation, but oddly enough, introduced eucalyptus (from Australia, of course) has no trouble growing at 4000 meters. It has been in the region for over a century, and is used for firewood and pole wood. If I were concerned with carbon capture I would plant lots of trees up high.
Of course eucalyptus introduces the potential for forest fires, as we have seen in Oakland and recently in Valparaiso. –AGF

This little curiosity caught my attention, not just because agfosterjr seemed to think that aforesting the tiny percentage of the world's land above 4,000 metres would make a huge difference to CO2, but because of his comment about eucalypts. When I looked it up I came across this article from 1999 that stated: The most abundant tree specie is eucalyptus. Growth and development of eucalyptus in the Altiplano is very slow, due to the adversity of the environment such as constant frost and prolonged period without precipitation. So it looks as if eucalyptus growth is retarded by cold and dry conditions.  According to the paper, the trees grow (very slowly) as spindly shrubs. Cold is the main thing stopping trees growing above the treeline generally.  (I guess that means the treeline will rise with global warming.) In the Andean Altiplano, lack of water doesn't help either.

David Ball fails arithmetic

A lot of comments were generated after David Ball failed arithmetic. David Ball, is a chip off the old block,  and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:47 am
As Don Easterbrook pointed out (do not recall the thread), a change from 300ppm to 400ppm is NOT a 30% increase in Co2, as alarmists constantly shout.

No, David, it's a 33% increase. The increase from preindustrial 280 ppm to 400 ppm is a 43% increase in atmospheric CO2. When he's corrected by Scott Scarborough, David doubles down on his arithmetic failure. David Ball says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:28 pm
Firstly, have the courage to address me directly. Secondly, go back to math class.
The clue is ppm. Get a clue:

Various other commenters weighed in, all supporting Scott Scarborough. David Ball retorts with his weird arithmetic, which has nothing to do with his original claim. What he's calculated isn't the amount of increase in CO2 (which has increased by more than 40%), he's talking about the change in CO2 as a percentage of the total atmosphere - going from 0.03% to 0.04%:

May 22, 2014 at 2:41 pm
The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.

What a nutter. Typical of the denialati David Ball is not just very confused about what it is that he's calculating, he's doing a fairly standard version of "how can a trace gas keep the world warm". His dad is a greenhouse effect denier, too, and co-author of the "sky dragon slayers" book - among other things.

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Benjamin Poulter, David Frank, Philippe Ciais, Ranga B. Myneni, Niels Andela, Jian Bi, Gregoire Broquet, Josep G. Canadell, Frederic Chevallier, Yi Y. Liu, Steven W. Running, Stephen Sitch & Guido R. van der Werf, "Contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13376

Daniel B. Metcalfe, "Climate science: A sink down under." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13341

Donohue, R. J., M. L. Roderick, T. R. McVicar, and G. D. Farquhar (2013), "Impact of CO2 fertilization on maximum foliage cover across the globe's warm, arid environments", Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, doi:10.1002/grl.50563.

Roberto Quiroz and Sassan Saatchi, (1999) "Mapping Aquatic and Agricultural Vegetation of Altiplano Using Spaceborne Radar Imagery",  from JPL-NASA website.

WUWT is severely undernourished when it comes to the science of crop production with rising CO2

Anthony Watts has another of his "claim" articles - which is his dogwhistle to the members of the WUWT Scientific Illiterati to display their allegiance to ignorance (archived here).

The science is about something that's been appearing in the literature over the years about the impact of rising CO2 on plant nutrients of importance to human health.  This time it's the result of a large international collaboration involving twenty scientists from the USA, Israel, Australia and Japan.

These twenty scientists are affiliated with numerous prominent organisations, including: Harvard (various), Ben-Gurion University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UC Davis, University of Pennsylvania, DEPI Victoria Australia, National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences Japan, USDA (various), University of Arizona, The Nature Conservancy New Mexico and The University of Melbourne (various).

About FACE

No, WUWT-ers haven't done an about-face.  This is about FACE, which was the system used in the research.

ScienceDaily.com has a press release about the research paper. (As usual, Anthony didn't provide a link to the paper or to the press release.) What the various studies looked at was the impact of higher CO2 levels on multiple varieties of multiple important staple crops, including wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize and sorghum. The way they did this was in open-air fields using a system that pumps out CO2 to simulate the levels expected over coming decades.  The CO2 pumping system, called FACE (Free Air Concentration Enrichment), pumps out CO2 and automatically adjusts it.  The research compared the crops grown under high CO2 with crops grown at current CO2 levels.  All the other growing conditions were the same - including sunlight, soil, water and temperature.

What they found is not a surprise to people who've been keeping up with the scientific literature but it's notable for the breadth and depth of the study, the variety of crops studied and the fact that it was conducted in open air conditions, with controls of current day conditions. As reported by ScienceDaily.com:

The study contributed "more than tenfold more data regarding both the zinc and iron content of the edible portions of crops grown under FACE conditions" than available from previous studies, the team wrote.

C3 crops have lower levels of important nutrients at higher CO2

The most important findings were that at higher CO2, a lot of the important crops (wheat, rice, field peas and soybeans) had a big reduction in zinc and iron, which is very important for human health. Zinc and iron deficiencies already affect a large number of people in the world and as CO2 rises, this could become an even bigger problem. Except for the legumes, the C3 crops also had lower concentrations of protein. Protein content is particularly important for processing qualities of wheat - making bread, pizzas and pasta for example. Of course it's also important nutritionally for wheat and rice.

Sorghum and maize are C4 plants and their nutrients weren't affected by higher CO2. C4 plants photosynthesize differently to C3 plants. From ScienceDaily.com again:

Nutrients in sorghum and maize remained relatively stable at higher CO2 levels because these crops use a type of photosynthesis, called C4, which already concentrates carbon dioxide in their leaves, Leakey said.

"C4 is sort of a fuel-injected photosynthesis that maize and sorghum and millet have," he said. "Our previous work here at Illinois has shown that their photosynthesis rates are not stimulated by being at elevated CO2. They already have high CO2 inside their leaves."

Role for plant breeders

The results of this research will be important for plant breeders.  There will need to be a focus on breeding to retain nutrients in crops grown under higher CO2 levels. It's just another feature to add to the growing list of attributes that plant breeders will need to focus on.  The list already includes breeding for drought tolerance, disease resistance under high humidity etc etc.  The abstract of the paper suggests:

Differences between cultivars of a single crop suggest that breeding for decreased sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 concentration could partly address these new challenges to global health.

From the WUWT comments

H/tip to Magma for pointing out the silliness at WUWT.

Lou says there's a simple solution - stop eating food:

May 7, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Hmm… It’s not like wheat is good for you anyway (See Heart Scan Blog or Wheat Belly Diet by Dr Mike Davis) for more information. Some are quite susceptible to wheat based food (diabetes and heart disease).

Anyway, I’ll have to see more studies to make sure that study holds up or not because as everybody already knows, leftists are desperate to label CO2 as dangerous so they’re looking for ways to demonize it.

Matt Maschinot says he's got another solution, the opposite to Lou - Matt says just eat more, not less:

May 7, 2014 at 2:24 pm
I’m curious as to what the growth efficiency was, for those plants that lost nutritional value. Is it possible that the additional CO2 increased the efficiency of the growth of the plant, and that by growing quicker, the plants did not accumulate the same level of nutrients?

If that’s the case, wouldn’t higher crop yields, result in lower cost, and higher consumption? And wouldn’t that offset the lower nutritional value of the individual plant?

schitzree doesn't know the difference between greenhouse tomatoes and open field grain and legume crops (or between greenhouse tomatoes and field tomatoes) and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:15 pm
So I guess we need to tell commercial greenhouse owners that they’ve been wrong all this time? I’m sure they will be happy to hear they won’t have to buy all that extra CO2 anymore.

tteclod didn't bother reading the press release and has a lot of questions for most of which the answer is already provided (as if anyone at WUWT would answer them anyway). tteclod is a clod and talks about "he" instead of the "they" - being 20 scientists, and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:22 pm
Also, he seems to differentiate between photosynthesis mechanisms. This looks like a study for a plant biologist and ag engineer to critique.

Also, what carbon-dioxide concentration did he achieve? How was the concentration measured? How was the CO2 introduced? Was the elevated CO2 level maintained throughout the daily photosynthesis cycle, or did it change according to time of day? How did they handle weather and winds in an open field. Did they measure the natural CO2 level in the region before, during, and after the experiment and compare to controls? What species of crops did they use? Did they make any comparison of nutritional values to nearby crops harvested by others?

ladylifegrows knows much more than all of those silly scientists from around the world put together, and says that the little goblins who work inside the cells of the plant factory will have lots of free time under higher CO2, because of "Rubisco". So they can turn their efforts to making other nutrients of "increased concentration and variety", presumably because they won't be as busy manufacturing carbohydrates:

May 7, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Rubisco is the name of the main plant protein that turns CO2 + H2O into sugar and oxygen. With higher CO2, the plant will need less of this protein and minerals associated with it. That will give the plant freedom to produce other nutrients in increased concentration and variety. Logically, this should mean a much more health-promoting food, but it would take sophisticated research for find out for sure or to quantify it. That pretty much cannot be done in a highly biased atmosphere. And good luck finding anything else.

Mike Maguire doesn't believe in wolves (or science), and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:28 pm
In Aesops Fable “The boy who cried wolf” how many different times did the village people get fooled?

In the IPCC Fable, “The planet that was being destroyed by CO2″ we have been subjected to hundreds(make that many thousands) of CO2 wolf stories but the CO2 wolf still has not come after 20 years.

At this point, even if this study was valid, it is almost impossible for me to believe that finally after screaming wolf for 20 years, a real wolf(and this one, not necessarily a big bad wolf) could actually be there.

Les Johnson says he doesn't believe it, but can't be bothered going to look at the article or tables himself:

May 7, 2014 at 2:33 pm
I see some control issues here. Protein in wheat is determined by how much rain and sun, and when during the wheat development, the rain and sun are applied. How long was the study? If only a few years, or god forbid one year, then the results would be weather more than CO2.
Anyone find the paper? I would like to read about the methods.

R2D2 says that undernourished people living in underdeveloped countries should pop into their local supermarket and buy some multi-vitamins - simple!

May 7, 2014 at 2:45 pm
Or take some multi vitamin

Kon Dealer is probably correct when she or he says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:52 pm
I guess these “scientists” have never heard of the word “fertliser”? 

I haven't come across that word before, either.


tegirinenashi, who wouldn't know science if it bit him in the butt, says:

May 7, 2014 at 3:16 pm
I think there is a way to combat this endless flow of superficial half-baked “research”. Conservative think tank institutions can establish annual “Bad Science” award with nominal prizes. I don’t think researchers would think twice before publishing anything that may be caught by negative publicity of getting BS award.

Charles Nelson didn't bother reading the article. He thinks the paper is about tomatoes. (It wasn't. It was a study of grain and legume field crops.) He says:

May 7, 2014 at 3:23 pm
Pure garbage.
Are they claiming that tomatoes grown in greenhouses with elevated CO2 are less ‘nutritious’?
I’ll bet they can afford ‘organic’ fruit and veg.

Jungle says the research is meaningless because plant breeders "should be able to adapt". Jungle doesn't say how the plant breeders are supposed to know what to adapt to, without studies such as these:

May 7, 2014 at 3:27 pm
Even if this was the case. Plant breeders should be able to adapt to that scenario. Another meaningless study.

Okay, I've read enough.  There are almost 100 WUWT comments along the lines of the above. A good example of the WUWT scientific illiterati who worship ignorance and despise knowledge and learning.

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Samuel S. Myers, Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nelson, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz, Yasuhiro Usui. Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13179 (pdf here)