More twittery nonsense from climate disinformers: In fact, the world is heating up!

There are one or two long-running denier conversations on Twitter. Here is another example of how they operate as illustrated by a tweeter called "StenchJudi".

Despite all the evidence showing the world is rapidly heating up, someone will tweet something outrageously wrong, such as "it's been cooling for twenty years". The only way they can rationalise such a ridiculous statement is by fudging the data, and claiming real observations are "fake".

The chart below shows how the global temperature has changed over the past twenty years, from 1999 to 2018:

Flashback to 1883: Burning coal is polluting the atmosphere

The letter below gets some things right and quite a bit wrong. What it does show is that 133 years ago, back in 1883, the general public was reading about how burning coal is polluting the atmosphere. Other newspaper flashbacks can be seen here, including my favourite, from 1884. Weirdly, there are still a few very vocal people who think gravity is a hoax or should I say the equivalent - that climate science is a hoax.

From the Wallaroo Times, South Australia, Saturday 1 September 1883

(The paragraph breaks and emphasis are mine.)

Pollution of the Atmosphere

There was a letter in Nature some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide; but, the author had overlooked the fact that the rain is continually cleansing the atmosphere of this, and the fall of this rain on the ground, and the combination of this with various salts ; besides the oceans alone would absorb their own bulk at normal pressure, but at an increased pressure of, say half a mile deep, would dissolve more than we are likely to need for hundreds of years.

But there are other products of combustion, or rather of incomplete combustion, that are not brought down in this manner by rain, as hydrogen and the hydrocarbons, chiefly marsh gas and ethylene. The latter has, I believe, been observed by the spectroscope on the Alps, and was supposed to have come from space.

I publish in Nature, sez Bartleby @wattsupwiththat...Oh yeah? Pull the other one!

You know how deniers at WUWT like to make out they know it all? Well, here's a comment you'll appreciate. It's from a pseudo-scientist who calls themselves Bartleby, who was protesting a Letter in Nature Climate Change. He or she wrote that the article was a mere letter, not a refereed article (or so Bartleby thinks)!

January 20, 2016 at 5:47 pm (my emphasis)
That was my first criticism Gary, but then I noticed the article was published in Nature.

I publish in Nature. Members of my family also publish there. I have to express strong disappointment with Nature’s editorial staff. In their defense, I’ll make note of the fact this was a “letter” rather than a refereed article. I suppose that should carry some weight, but I’ve also noticed an editorial bias towards publishing absurd psuedo-scientific flapdoodle like this.

Personally? I’m disgusted and will never submit a paper to Nature again.

Bartleby has clearly never even looked at the table of contents in a Nature journal, much less submitted a manuscript.

PS There's nothing wrong with not knowing that to have a Letter published in Nature is something that many budding scientists hope they can achieve once in their career. It's his woeful attempt to bignote himself with the illiterati by pretending familiarity with a journal he's never looked at, that makes Bartleby the fool.

North American deniers are astoundingly ignorant. Take Judith Curry...

I wasn't going to write about the allegations of sexual harassment against Rajendra Pachauri, and I won't. However I will pick up on something that I admit to finding very difficult to believe. After all, Judith Curry is a professor. A supposedly educated woman.

You thought so too? Think again.

Confirming (again) the CO2 greenhouse effect - but WUWT doesn't like it

There's a new paper out in Nature, by Daniel Feldman and his colleagues, in which they describe how they've measured the contribution of CO2 to radiative forcing at the surface. The measurements were taken in Alaska and Oklahoma. This is not something that's easy to do. It is not straightforward. There are lots of things that happen in the lower atmosphere and at the surface. The scientists managed to extract the signal of radiative forcing from CO2 from that of other things that affect spectral measurements.

Not so fast, WUWT! Antarctica could melt quite quickly.

In another "it won't happen to me" article at WUWT, Anthony Watts decides that all the science is wrong again. Not that he'd be able to tell, even if he had a year to try to figure it out according to his close friend and ally, Willis Eschenbach.

There is a new paper out in Nature Communications about meltwater pulses and accelerated ice loss from Antarctica. It describes model simulations of Antarctic ice sheet evolution over the last 25,000 years. What was found was "several episodes of accelerated ice-sheet recession, the largest being coincident with meltwater pulse 1A." The abstract continues: "This resulted from reduced Southern Ocean overturning following Heinrich Event 1, when warmer subsurface water thermally eroded grounded marine-based ice and instigated a positive feedback that further accelerated ice-sheet retreat."

Below is a clever animation from the Nature Communications article, demonstrating how the warmer sub-surface of the ocean can melt Antarctica.

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.

Has a "climate journalist" discovered a major blunder?

Update 2: I've written two more articles about this. The main one is about the paper itself and points out some of the errors made at WUWT. The other was an interim follow up to the release of the paper.

Update: the Risbey paper is out (h/t Steve Bloom) and can be accessed here at Nature Climate Change, but you'll need a subscription. Stephan Lewandowsky has been good enough to write about it on his blog.

Sou 3:53 am AEST 21 July 2014

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We'll have to wait and see. Anthony Watts thinks he has found a "major blunder" in a new paper (archived here). This is the same Anthony Watts who was described by his good friend, Willis Eschenbach, as (paraphrased):

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he publishes on his blog, he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure. 

This same Anthony Watts writes:

As a climate journalist running the most viewed blog on climate, I have been graciously provided an advance copy of the press release and paper Risbey et al. (2014) that is being held under embargo until Sunday, July 20th. I am in the process of helping to co-author a rebuttal to Risbey et al. (2014) I think we’ve spotted a major blunder, but I want to check with a team member first. 

If Anthony Watts is a climate journalist he hides it well. Anthony is hopeless at the job. He posed as a journalist to get a free press pass to AGU13, but the most interesting thing he "reported" was that he could hear the sound of smirks. The rest could not be described as "journalism" by any stretch of the imagination.

This is the same Anthony Watts who had so much difficulty Googling "James Risbey, CSIRO" and clicking on the first item in the list, writing:

Hello Dr. Risbey,
At first I had trouble finding your email, which is why I sent it to Ms.Oreskes first. I dare not send it to professor Lewandowsky, since as we have seen by example, all he does is taunt people who have legitimate questions.

This is the same Anthony Watts who thinks dumb questions are "legitimate".  Anthony doesn't like being "taunted".

Clarification: In case you thought Anthony had been "graciously provided" with a copy of the paper by the journal Nature or one of the authors, you'd be wrong. He said he was emailed a copy by a "journalist". (My guess is the so-called "journalist" is someone like Steve Milloy who blogs junk science.) Sou: 7:45 pm AEST 20/7/14

If you're interested, the question that Anthony posed was related to climate models and the simulation of "spatial patterns of the warming and cooling trends in sea surface temperatures during the hiatus period". There was a special issue of Nature Geoscience this March, which had a number of articles relating to global warming over the past few years. And there've been other papers, such as this one by Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie in Nature.

Getting back to Anthony's question - he said he wants to "check with a team member first".  But that claim is contradicted by the fact that he was so excited that he might have found "something wrong" that he preempted any reply by writing about it on his blog.

True to form, Anthony doesn't wait for the answer, but posts about his "cleverness" on his blog. That's the point. He doesn't care about the answer. All he cares about is that a question at WUWT, any question, no matter if it's dumb or on the ball, is fodder for dumb deniers to claim AGW is a hoax.

We'll have to wait and see if Anthony Watts and perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale have accidentally been right this time. Since we don't yet know what the paper is about (though we can take a stab at guessing the general topic), there is insufficient data to come to any conclusion.

From the WUWT comments

Brad says:

July 19, 2014 at 9:58 am
Anthony,
Very well written!! Nothing “extra” added, simply asking a question.
It will be interesting to see if you get a response, or the release gets pushed back.

Anthony's response to Verity Jones is more evidence that he is not a climate journalist. Otherwise he'd be well aware of the fact that Stephan Lewandowsky and Naomi Oreskes are not climate modellers. Verity says:

July 19, 2014 at 10:06 am
Anthony,
I was going to ask if you were sent the supplementary data that so often accompanies papers published in Nature, but it is unusual for papers relying on separate supplements to refer the reader to them, so I am supposing this is not an oversight of the sender in this case. Very well handled.

REPLY: I asked the journalist if an SI was included, and none was listed. Still such an important label of the best and worst models, central to the claim of the paper, surely would not be relegated to the depths of an SI. – Anthony 

At the time of archiving there were 130 comments. So many strong opinions about a paper that has not yet been released from the embargo. About a paper of which no-one but Anthony and Bob Tisdale know the subject. About the authors of the paper, and about Anthony's cleverness and astuteness as a "climate journalist".

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Whether the Weather

I hope James Risbey doesn't mind my copying his little rhyme, which most internet sources attribute to John Ruskin:

Whether the weather be fine 

Or whether the weather be not 

Whether the weather be cold 

Or whether the weather be hot, 

We'll weather the weather 

Whatever the weather 

Whether we like it or not.

And I've got my own version: 

Some of us will weather the weather, 

some of us will end up under the weather, 

some of us are totally over the weather and, 

whether we like it or not, 

some of us won't weather the weather at all.

Sou 4:29 pm AEST 20 July 2014

A curious finding from WUWT in Korean speleothems

Here's one for the shrinks out there. Anthony Watts isn't scoffing at a new scientific paper and the question is, why not? (Archived here).

There's a new paper in Nature about climate (hydrologic) patterns in the mid-latitudes and how there appear to be opposite swings in part of the northern and southern hemisphere mid-latitudes in relation to moisture. (Anthony has finally taken notice of the gripe that he doesn't link to sources, because this time he did link to the press release, though not to the paper itself.)

The researchers were studying climate patterns over the past 550,000 years. They analysed samples from limestone caves in Korea. In glacial periods when it is cold and dry the limestone growth stagnates and in interglacials when it is warm and moist they grow (I'd say it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it). Having established climatic patterns in those locations they looked at a range of climate data from elsewhere - solar insolation, glaciers, and deep sea sediments, and found that the same climate change patterns for the same periods.

So then they examined other limestone formations in the southern and northern hemisphere and found a see-saw pattern for the hydrology of the mid-latitudes. More moisture meant a bit warmer and less moisture meant colder and the hemispheres had an opposite pattern, or a see-saw pattern during glacials and interglacials.  From the press release:

In particular, he and colleagues revealed the fact that climate changes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres showed opposite tendencies by analyzing the fact that stalagmites and flowstones in the temperate zones of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres had opposite growth periods. This suggests for the first time that the so-called phenomenon of the interhemispheric hydrological seesaw that the precipitation changes in the tropical regions show opposing tendencies between Northern and Southern Hemispheres had been spread to the temperate region in which the Korean peninsula was located at least for the last 550,000 years.

Due to the interhemispheric hydrological seesaw, when it rains frequently in a region that belongs to the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), it accelerates the growth of plants and increases the temperature, whereas other areas exhibit cold dry weather. This theory has been applied only to the tropical region and had not been significance in global climate change. However, if it is expanded to the temperate regions by the study of Doctor Jo, the seesaw phenomenon may be regarded as another key factor besides the insolation change which has been regarded as the most powerful factor in the glacial and interglacial cycles.

Put simplistically, as I understand it, when it's warm and moist somewhere it's cold and dry somewhere else - and this has been observed as a see-saw hemispherical pattern in some areas of the tropics and now, with this research, in part of the mid-latitudes. The pattern is purported to be a climatic response to orbital forcing. So it looks as if we're talking about gross patterns over millenia on a geological time scale, not annual, decadal or even centennial patterns.

I found the abstract easier to follow than the press release, so here it is (my paras):

An interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw—in which latitudinal migrations of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) produce simultaneous wetting (increased precipitation) in one hemisphere and drying in the other—has been discovered in some tropical and subtropical regions1, 2, 3. For instance, Chinese and Brazilian subtropical speleothem (cave formations such as stalactites and stalagmites) records show opposite trends in time series of oxygen isotopes (a proxy for precipitation variability) at millennial to orbital timescales2, 3, suggesting that hydrologic cycles were antiphased in the northerly versus southerly subtropics.

This tropical to subtropical hydrologic phenomenon is likely to be an initial and important climatic response to orbital forcing3. The impacts of such an interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw on higher-latitude regions and the global climate system, however, are unknown. Here we show that the antiphasing seen in the tropical records is also present in both hemispheres of the mid-latitude western Pacific Ocean.

Our results are based on a new 550,000-year record of the growth frequency of speleothems from the Korean peninsula, which we compare to Southern Hemisphere equivalents4. The Korean data are discontinuous and derived from 24 separate speleothems, but still allow the identification of periods of peak speleothem growth and, thus, precipitation.

The clear hemispheric antiphasing indicates that the sphere of influence of the interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years extended at least to the mid-latitudes, such as northeast Asia, and that orbital-timescale ITCZ shifts can have serious effects on temperate climate systems. Furthermore, our result implies that insolation-driven ITCZ dynamics may provoke water vapour and vegetation feedbacks in northern mid-latitude regions and could have regulated global climate conditions throughout the late Quaternary ice age cycles.

The curiosity at WUWT

The research is interesting in and of itself. What I also found interesting from a denier-watch perspective was that it was presented at WUWT without any "claim" in the headline and as if it were solid science, not something to be mocked. Anthony wrote the following headline and lead-in (archived here):

Study finds climate of the past behaved as hemispherical opposites

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Anthony Watts

This is from a press release from the Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral resources (KIGAM) The English in the PR is not the best, but is does have an interesting finding.

The question in my mind is:

• Is this a new resolution of Anthony's in response to a small number of people requesting less scoffing at science and more of the "here it is, you decide" approach - or
• Is it that Korean science is more acceptable to science deniers than science from the USA, Oceania and Europe? (Two of the authors are from the University of Minnesota, but Anthony probably doesn't know that.)

The research itself relies on fairly sparse data from few locations - "24 separate speleothems from 15 limestone caves" in Korea combined with what I understand to have been existing analyses from selected locations elsewhere in the world.  The southern hemisphere data is only from a few locations - described in the research as the western Pacific, though it includes caves in Naracoorte in South Australia.

The supplementary information includes the following images (click to enlarge):

Background image is from NASA Eclipse Web Site (http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/TV2004.html). a, Peak interglacial periods are characterized by large geographic variations in the seasonal ITCZ and strong atmospheric meridional overturning circulations. b, Stadial periods show intermediate climatic conditions between those of peak interglacial and full glacial periods. c, Interstadial periods show intermediate climatic conditions between those of peak interglacial and full glacial periods. d, Full glacial periods are characterized by small geographic variations in the seasonal ITCZ and weak atmospheric meridional overturning circulations. Conceptual geographic ranges of estimated permafrost and ice sheets during stadial periods are shown by grey- and white-coloured areas, respectively48. Also shown are the cave locations of active speleothem growth during each time period (red dots)4, 15, 21, 42, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59. See Methods for a detailed description of the scenario.

I'm not questioning the research itself.  It looks quite interesting and the scientists themselves as well as reviewers from Nature think so too.

What I'm curious about is why, when science deniers reject global temperature reconstructions of the past one or two millenia, which are based on many, many more proxies of many many more different types from many, many more locations all around the world - why they would embrace a study of climate patterns over five hundred and fifty millenia based on a very small number of proxies from a much smaller number of locations? (You may recall the vehement protests from the denialati at Marcott13.)

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts had better watch out. Some of his readers respond as if the paper has merit - heaven forbid! For example, a couple of people picked up on the orbital linkage (Milankovitch cycles), though they didn't seem aware that the research findings were that this was likely a "climatic response to orbital forcing". JimS says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Perhaps this phenomenon can be explained by the Milankovitch precession cycle?

Frank Lee responds to JimS and says:

June 18, 2014 at 7:58 pm
JimS suggested this may have something to do with Milankovitch’s precession cycle, but I believe it is the eccentricity of the elliptical orbit that would better explain the differences between the northern and southern hemispheres. As I understand them, both the tilt and precession cycles would move both hemispheres toward or away from a glaciation at the same time, but the eccentricity cycle would have opposite effects on the hemispheres. 

PeteP adds some information from a sciencedaily.com article about  a 2009 paper about oceanic patterns and says:

June 18, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Is this perhaps related to, and builds on, this study of the Atlantic Ocean currents?
Cardiff University. “Oceanic Seesaw Links Northern And Southern Hemisphere During Abrupt Climate Change During Last Ice Age.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 March 2009. .
The new study suggests that abrupt changes in the north were accompanied by equally abrupt but opposite changes in the south. It provides the first concrete evidence of an immediate seesaw connection between the North and South Atlantic. The data shows, for example, that an abrupt cooling in the north would be accompanied by a rapid southerly shift of ocean fronts in the Southern Ocean, followed by more gradual warming across the south.
Dr Barker explains: “The most intuitive way to explain these changes is by varying the strength of ocean circulation in the Atlantic. By weakening the circulation, the heat transported northwards would be retained in the south.” 

Greg Goodman starts off well but spoils it a bit at the end when he says (excerpts):

June 18, 2014 at 11:39 pm
There have been several lines of evidence that the hemispheres do not run in sync.
A lot of warmist claims that LIA was predominantly a NH phenomenon. Opposite tendancies of polar trends as we are currently seeing, often refered to as “polar see-saw” and differences of timing in the changes that marked the end of last glacial period.

...There are clearly large scale changes that produce opposing effects in each hemisphere. Since the NH has more land and thus less heat capacity at the surface it’s temperatures will vary more than SH. Thus the usual obsession with metrics like “global mean surface temperature” could suggest “global warming” even if the global heat content did not change. 

Then come the less knowledgeable WUWT-ers. Gunga Din confuses weather and climate and says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:56 pm
Perhaps I missed something (wouldn’t the first time), but might not the fact that the seasons are opposite in the NH and SH have something to do it?

Santa Baby says irrelevantly and wrongly (the sun has a polarity flip every 11 years or so):

June 18, 2014 at 8:31 pm
The Sun changes magnetic polarity after aprox 22 years and Earth does not? 

philjourdan says:

June 18, 2014 at 5:37 pm
That seems to jive with the fact that almost all the warming during the 90s was in the NH. And why Antarctica ice is growing.

Finally the hard core WUWT illiterati bash away at their keyboards, as they do with every science article. Eustace Cranch says:

June 18, 2014 at 6:14 pm
“…in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which have been puzzled for the past 60 years.”
The cycles have been puzzled? Dang, climate science confuses everything :)

And illiterati member Aphan says:

June 18, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Wait..what? They are just now figuring out that they are opposites??? Woah

cnxtim says:

June 18, 2014 at 5:16 pm
So, I guess now the new “scare-em” headline will be CHAGW?

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Kyoung-nam Jo, Kyung Sik Woo, Sangheon Yi, Dong Yoon Yang, Hyoun Soo Lim, Yongjin Wang, Hai Cheng, R. Lawrence Edwards. "Mid-latitude interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years". Nature, 2014; 508 (7496): 378 DOI: 10.1038/nature13076

Barker, Stephen, Paula Diz, Maryline J. Vautravers, Jennifer Pike, Gregor Knorr, Ian R. Hall, and Wallace S. Broecker. "Interhemispheric Atlantic seesaw response during the last deglaciation." Nature 457, no. 7233 (2009): 1097-1102. doi:10.1038/nature07770

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.

---

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.

Arctic warming: It's not natural variability, it's all down to soot, sez Anthony Watts at WUWT

In yet another "anything but CO2" article (archived here, latest update here), Anthony Watts wants to blame all the recent warming in Greenland on soot.  He reaches left, right, up and down to get out of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas and warming the world. Which is pretty funny when he also tries the "I'm a reasonable man, really I am" tack by posting articles where he pretends that he really does think there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect.

What's even funnier is that Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in his effort to blame soot for Greenland warming.

Changes in atmospheric circulation caused some of the Arctic warming

Anthony is disputing another Nature paper, this one is about attribution of the causes of the very high amount of warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada. Going by the abstract and the press release, the authors have concluded that up to half the recent warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada may be natural variability. These areas have been warming at around 1° Celsius a decade since 1979, which is about twice that of the global average temperature rise.  The scientists have found that about half of this (0.5° Celsius a decade) is related to changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, caused by a warmer western tropical Pacific Ocean.

From ScienceDaily.com:

The natural variations in the new study related to an unusually warm western tropical Pacific, near Papua New Guinea. Since the mid-1990s the water surface there has been about 0.3 degrees hotter than normal. Computer models show this affects the regional air pressure, setting off a stationary wave in the atmosphere that arcs in a great circle from the tropical Pacific toward Greenland before turning back over the Atlantic.

"Along this wave train there are warm spots where the air has been pushed down, and cold spots where the air has been pulled up," Wallace said. "And Greenland is in one of the warm spots."

In previous studies, Wallace and Battisti have documented the existence of decades-long climate variations in the Pacific Ocean that resemble the well-known shorter-range El Niño variations.

This particular location in the tropical Pacific may be a "sweet spot" for generating global atmospheric waves. A series of studies led by co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, working with Ding and Battisti, showed that waves starting in the same place but radiating southward are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.
Researchers can't say for how long the tropical Pacific will remain in this state.

"Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part -- forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases -- but about half comes from the unpredictable part," Steig said.

The atmosphere makes the world seem small

The world is large, but studies like this show that the world isn't so large that the ocean right down near New Guinea, which is in the tropical southern hemisphere can affect the Arctic, way up north. And at the same time this same area of the Pacific is causing atmospheric waves that are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.

Anthony's sooty fixation

Anthony doesn't believe it.  He wrote about a photo of a pool of water in Greenland, which I traced back to here originally.  Anthony isn't talking about the dirty snow in the foreground. He's talking about the dark section of the pool in the shadow.

Water Filled Canyon (Greenland) Although snow has dammed outflow from the lake, nearby melt streams continue to fill sections of the canyon where snow has not accumulated.

Credit and Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

Anthony doesn't say how he can tell from a photograph what is causing the darker colour in the pool - whether it's dust or dirt or soot or algae or just extra deep water or all of these. Anthony Watts has done his photo-science and decided that it's definitely soot, writing:

[Note: part of the answer is in the photo they provide with the press release below, but they don't see it. - Anthony]...

...Note the black at the bottom of the melt pool, that’s carbon soot. That’s something the UW authors aren’t paying attention to....

…it has a big effect on albedo, and thus absorbed solar insolation, likely far more so than CO2 forcing, 

Another thing is, if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract and the references, he'd have noticed that the authors do indeed acknowledge that black soot does play a part in warming the Arctic (and the world). If he'd read the paper the scientists referenced, he'd have noticed that black carbon, although it does have a large effect it's not as large a forcing as CO2. As Hansen and Nazarenko wrote:

The substantial role inferred for soot in global climate does not alter the fact that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming in the past century and are expected to be the largest climate forcing the rest of this century.

You may recall that Anthony has tried this argument before, misrepresenting the findings of another more recent study, which showed that the impact of soot on the Arctic depends on where it comes from. If it comes from the Arctic itself it will have a bigger impact than if it comes from the mid-latitudes. ("The Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes.")

Since I started this article, Anthony has added another photo showing how the albedo on Greenland has changed over the years. Thing is, it's not just dirt and dust and soot that causes the surface to become darker. As it states in the NASA article that Anthony refers to, it's not just soot:

Climate scientists have long expected that Earth’s icy North would become less reflective as global temperatures rose. Rising temperatures melt snow and ice. The uncovered terrain is darker—ocean water, vegetation, bare ground—so the area absorbs more sunlight than it used to, leading to more warming, which causes more melting. In short, the loss of reflectiveness amplifies the initial warming. This feedback is underway on Greenland’s ice, especially since 2006, a year that marks a fundamental shift toward a warmer, greener Arctic, according to the Arctic Report Card.

...The darkening in the non-melting areas, says Dr. Box, is due to changes in the shape and size of the ice crystals in the snowpack as its temperature rises. Snow grains clump together, and they reflect less light than the many-faceted, smaller crystals. Additional heat rounds the sharp edges of the crystals. Round particles absorb more sunlight than jagged ones do. 

Here is a chart showing overall contributions of humans to global warming. CO2 is by far the biggest followed by methane, but soot plays quite an important role as well. Click for larger view.

Figure TS.7 Radiative forcing of climate change during the industrial era shown by emitted components from 1750 to 2011. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

A couple of other points. Anthony wants to blame the hotter Greenland and north eastern Canada on soot. What about the rest of the Arctic? Is soot not falling there? And is there more soot falling in the Arctic now than it did in the past?  I don't know the answer to those questions, but from what I've read there isn't any more soot being produced than there was in the past. If anything, it's decreasing.

The really weird thing is that in his focus on soot (much of which comes from human activity), Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in the recent rapid warming of Greenland and north eastern Canada, which is what the paper was all about after all.

From the WUWT comments

Surprisingly a lot of people are quizzing Anthony on his interpretation of the photograph he showed above. He's not having a good day.

Francisco Fernandez thinks that we should have all perished by now. He's quite impatient and has no concept of geological time scales when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:35 am
What I don’t get is, with all this modelling and VERY (sarc) high climate sensitivity, how is it that there’s still life on earth?

Wouldn’t the extintion of the dinosaurs, due to a catastrophic event that obliterated the species, would have caused more damage than mere CO2 <0.04%v/v?

Now, I am not sure if the dinosaur extintion due to the meteorite is a fact or theory. But if it is a fact, shouldn't it shed some light on how resilent the climate is?

steveta_uk thinks the study means he doesn't have to be concerned about global warming and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:36 am
If they’re right, and 1/2 the warming is natural, then that about agrees with the recent lower estimates for sensitivity, and means that the expected 1.5C warming by 2100 is nothing to panic about.
So Steig has joined us at last!

john challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:40 am
Anthony, is it ALL carbon soot? Does wind blown glacial dust, or atmospheric dust, also take on a dark color when submerged? Not disagreeing about albedo effect, just wondering if carbon is the only source of dark coloration at the bottom of a melt pool on a glacier.

Billy Liar also challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:47 am
Can someone point to a chemical analysis of the black stuff in that Greenland pond?
I’m sceptical that it is ‘soot’. Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?

When Paul Woland compliments Anthony for posting an article from Nature, Anthony sticks to his photo-science:

May 8, 2014 at 7:48 am
Well done WUWT for finally starting to publish research papers that, like virtually all climate-related papers in Nature, attests to the reality of significant temperature increases caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

REPLY: So like the authors of the paper, you missed what was in the photo too? – Anthony

SIGINT EX quibbles with Anthony, but Anthony is sticking to his guns:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
No soot in the pool ! Just a photograph, low sun angle, shadow and diminished illumination against a very bright foreground on top ! Particulate measured in Firn and glacier ice is at the ppm level. Not enough to make a difference.

REPLY: No, sorry, you are wrong. It’s soot, dust, etc. people have sampled the bottom of those pools. Read the links provided before inserting foot in mouth. See map I’m adding from NASA showing deposition – Anthony

Neil says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

richard says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:27 am
To me the dark part looks like a deeper part of the water, i notice that there are no darker parts elsewhere or if it is does the movement of water carry it to one part.

The bottom of the picture shows discoloration of the snow- soot? that has melted and yet everywhere else looks pristine. 

Shawn in High River doesn't realise that the scientists have crunched the numbers and says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:44 am
How do they know that exactly half is due to AGW and the other half is the unpredictable part? How did they come up with that figure of 50% AGW ?

hunter confuses Greenland and north eastern Canada with the entire world when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:58 am
In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?

Steven Mosher becomes a bit impatient with Anthony Watts and his fake sceptics and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am
“Neil says: May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

1. There is no evidence that this photo shows soot.
2. Its assumed and asserted as fact.
3. Note the lack of skepticism about this “evidence”

That said, soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.
If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM.
or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.

Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.

Politics: assert that its all down to soot. no comprehensive data, no methods, a few pictures, no testing of the hypothesis.. just assertion.

Doug Proctor also thinks that Greenland is the whole world and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:55 am
To say that half is natural, not human-caused, is to say that you are a denier (of consensus, IPCC science). It is to say that any action to reduce human generated CO2 will have half the effect of the IPCC scenarios, and kill both the economics and the actual result of what is proposed “must” happen. 

---

Qinghua Ding, John M. Wallace, David S. Battisti, Eric J. Steig, Ailie J. E. Gallant, Hyung-Jin Kim, Lei Geng. Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland. Nature, 2014; 509 (7499): 209 DOI: 10.1038/nature13260

Hansen, James, and Larissa Nazarenko. "Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 2 (2004): 423-428. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2237157100

Sand, M., T. K. Berntsen, Ø. Seland, and J. E. Kristjánsson (2013), Arctic surface temperature change to emissions of black carbon within Arctic or midlatitudes, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50613.

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.

---

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)

Dunning and Kruger in the Cenozoic Era at WUWT - very uplifting :)

Anthony Watts has a new article on his blog today (archived here).  It's about a paper in Nature about some research estimating the amount of CO2 released by tectonic activity, I suppose you'd call it.  When mountains are formed and fresh rock is exposed the scientists postulated that there was more chemical reactions going on than previously thought, releasing CO2.  The work was done by Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li.

As usual, Anthony didn't link to the paper or press release itself but it wasn't hard to find either.  The paper has a dry title: Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales.

Some science media outlets jazzed up the research up with a catchy headline, which Anthony borrowed (and no sign of a "claim"):

The Goldilocks principle: New hypothesis explains earth's continued habitability

Goldilocks & the 3 bears minus Goldilocks.
Robert Southey 1837

The Goldilocks principle was invoked because the paper was about how CO2 keeps the earth "not too hot and not too cold" - though it isn't always "just right" for everyone and everything, is it.


Anyway, the scientists worked out that over the Cenozoic era, marine analysis suggests there was extensive weathering of silicates when mountains were popping up all over the world, but there wasn't enough CO2 released from volcanic eruptions to balance the books.  They reckoned that "The resulting imbalance would have depleted the atmosphere of all CO2 within a few million years7."

So they put on their thinking caps and had a close look at some mountains in Peru.  They figured that there was CO2 being released from fresh rock exposed during tectonic activity.  The way I read their research, what they are saying is that when there's a lot of tectonic activity there was both more CO2 absorbed by weathering as well as more CO2 released by chemical reactions.

This is all on geological time scales, needless to say.  We're not talking in time frames of decades - this is the slow carbon cycle over thousands to millions of years.  That's for the CO2 absorption by silicate weathering and the release by chemical activity.  If volcanoes are big enough they can affect CO2 on much shorter time frames.

From the University of Southern California:

Torres and West studied rocks taken from the Andes mountain range in Peru and found that weathering processes affecting rocks released far more carbon than previously estimated, which motivated them to consider the global implications of CO2 release during mountain formation. ...

...Like many other large mountain ranges, such as the great Himalayas, the Andes began to form during the Cenozoic period, which began about 60 million years ago and happened to coincide with a major perturbation in the cycling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Using marine records of the long-term carbon cycle, Torres, West and Li reconstructed the balance between CO2 release and uptake caused by the uplift of large mountain ranges and found that the release of CO2 release by rock weathering may have played a large, but thus far unrecognized, role in regulating the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last roughly 60 million years.

(If you go to the USC website, I suggest use Firefox or IE, not Chrome. It's not Chrome-friendly.  But the USC has the full press release.  Other sites have only got a short version.)

Here's a link to one of NASA's Earth Observatory articles - on the slow carbon cycle and more.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony didn't have anything to add to his copied press release.  The rabble, they are another story. Get a load of this comment from devijvers, who is crying out for someone to call Poe when s/he strums a variation on the "scientists don't know nuffin'" theme:

March 20, 2014 at 1:10 am
The CO2 cycle:
Ocean plant life syncs to the bottom, becomes part of the sediment and eventually becomes rock. This is how CO2 is sequestered in rock.The tectonic conveyor belt slowly takes the ocean floor to the subduction zones, melting the rock by means of magma.The CO2 now mixed in magma is ejected by volcanoes. Wheatering of the newly formed rocks releases CO2.
This article is pure nonsense. More CO2 needs to be released by the wheatering than is used for the wheatering, otherwise we would have ran out long time ago. Where did these people get their degrees?

Matthijs seems to think we could end up like Venus in the blink of an eye - or maybe like Mars and says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:16 am
Another one that claims nature is in balance.
It is not.
It is a chaotic system that will flow from state to state depending on events that occur.
No way of telling what the next state is.

AleaJactaEst has it all figured out.  Scientists can pack up and go home:

March 20, 2014 at 1:17 am
…”While human-made atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are currently driving significant changes in the Earth’s climate….” and what would those be then?
The Earth has and will continue to go through several oxidising and reducing cycles (Devonian Permian e.g.) base solely on land mass accretion and subduction whose engine is the deep mantle plumes, the heat of which is derived from radioactive decay. The rest of our surface cycles are simply reactions, not balances, to the aforementioned cycles.

Paul Pierett calls on scientists to lend authority to his argument that scientists don't know nuffin' - (yeah, he's a bit mixed up) - but he's yours, most sincerely, if you'll take him:

March 20, 2014 at 1:29 am
I think they are close but have the cart before the horse. They still blame man. Too, not too many look beyond man for command and control of CO2 levels and there is the fail point.
Let’s begin with Milankovitch Cycles and Sunspot Cycles for the cause in geological cycles. From there gain and understanding of Topography shifts North and South of the Equator As the Earth emerges from and Ice Age and Returns again with mini-ice ages in the middle.
The Glaciers, Polar Ice Caps store the excess CO2 and releases them in the Ocean exchange as the Earth warms up and Topography expands and is allowed to expand. For example, when Lord Monckton testified before Congress a couple of years ago, the woman tree ring scientist testified that the tree line in the Sierra was higher for tree stumps were at a much higher elevation than at the present tree line. Thus, less Glaciers and Polar Ice mass released more CO2 to the Oceans and more provided for Topography at higher elevations and Latitudes.
As for the Pyrite, adjustments were made as much for the Volcanoes over time which we saw with Mt. Pinatubo.
Most Sincerely
Paul Pierett 

Talking of being mixed up.  A prize for anyone who can figure out what is going on in Mike Alger's little brain when he says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:39 am
Once again there is an overriding paradigm assumption that it is CO2 that is the main driver of the climatic system throughout geologic history…an assumption that I think is flawed in its very core. Even the warmists admit that the direct contribution of another doubling of CO2 is probably at most 1degree C…it’s the feedbacks that cause the catastrophic warming they are so worried about. But the feedbacks aren’t caused directly by CO2, they are caused by the slight warming the CO2 allegedly causes. So why focus on what controls the CO2 throughout geologic history? Instead focus on what causes the warming and cooling, which probably has much more to do with CO2 concentrations than the other way around.

My oh my, and I've hardly skipped over any comments.  Dunning and Kruger would have a field day at WUWT today.  Okay, just one more.  This time from our good friend, Leo Geiger, who is no doubt destined for the WUWT bin sooner rather than later:

Leo Geiger says:

March 20, 2014 at 3:36 am
I wonder what the criteria is for deciding whether or not published research needs to be introduced here with the word “Claim:” added as a prefix in the title? This one avoids that particular characterization.

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Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li. "Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales." Nature 507, 346–349 (20 March 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13030