Remember when solar alarmists said our sun would grow into a red giant? Never mind. It's corny!

He's done it again!

In the past, Anthony Watts from the denier blog WUWT has implied that because something hasn't happened yet it never will (to a ludicrous extent). He wants his readers to think that climate science is a hoax, or global warming won't be that bad and might even be good on balance. He's used evidence such as predictions that something is likely to happen in 60, 80, 100 years or more hasn't happened by today. It makes you wonder if he thinks he's immortal.

Today he's done it again, with one of his "Never Mind" headlines. This is one of his formulaic headlines, (another is "Claim:") which he uses to signal that he doesn't believe science. Note that in the USA, maize is called corn.

A frosty look at David Archibald's latest speculation about global cooling

It was so cold this morning that I had to hop into the fridge to warm up. It's winter, of course, but it got quite cold even for winter in this part of the world - measuring about minus 6.4 Celsius this morning at our place.

Okay, I know for some of you that would be a mild winter's morning. Here it's worth lots of tweets. We're no longer used to having the sort of frosty mornings that were common when I was a child. What used to be the norm has now become a novelty with the world warming up so much.

Figure 1 | Frosty nights in Australia via BoM

Deniers can get all of a twitter when there's a frost. They are scared that it means an ice age is coming. Take David Archibald. He's been predicting an ice age for something like twelve years, ever since (he says) he "started out in climate science". He says his first paper was written just a few months later, but the only place he could publish it was in the denier journal Energy and Environment.

Do you believe wheat viruses can disappear by magic?

Some of the deniers at WUWT still believe in magic. They can't or won't see the world for what it is.

Anthony Watts' current stand-in at WUWT, Eric Worrall, has written an article (archived here) about how know-nothing Eric just knows the scientists are wrong, and even if they are right it will all go away - by magic. He's talking about something reported as a "world first" discovery by scientists at an agricultural research station in Horsham, Victoria (Australia).

Even though by now I can probably be considered a slightly jaded denier watcher, the illogic of deniers can still surprise. Every now and again a particularly silly article like that one from Eric, reminds me that if deniers are bad at one thing, it's clear thinking.

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)

Anthony Watts denies agricultural science at WUWT

As many of us would have predicted (had we bothered with such a prediction), with the release of the IPCC AR5 WGII report, deniers have been busy protesting climate science.

I started to put together a summary of protest articles from WUWT:

• Larry Hamlin says the risks are overstated (archived here).
• The GWPF advisers can't make up their mind if the report is alarmist or if it's a comfort.  Richard Tol says the report is too alarmist for his taste and when Bob Ward points out where he's made mistakes Richard goes all sooky (as he does) and claims he's being "smeared".  Matt Ridley, on the other hand, says the latest report has "toned down the alarmism". I've written about that already - well not the smeary Richard bit.  The IPCC itself has addressed that one!  And here's the Daily Mail articles that the IPCC was responding to. (For fun, read the caption under the photo of Ed Davey, half way down the page.)
• Anthony Watts says a journalist for the LA Times is wrong and that crop yields are not depressed because Roy Spencer told him so (archived here).

Hang on, that last one is something I'm quite interested in.  I didn't know that Roy Spencer was an expert in agriculture.  Maybe it's Roy Spencer who's wrong.  Here is what Anthony wrongly "claims":

LA Times Tony Barboza gets caught fear mongering the IPCC report, becomes first victim of facts that don’t agree with claims

....Problem is, the agricultural data doesn’t match the LATimes/IPCC claim, see for yourself:

I decided to look first at what the journalist actually wrote.  Here it is, in an article by Tony Barboza in the Los Angeles Times:

One of the panel's most striking new conclusions is that rising temperatures are already depressing crop yields, including those of corn and wheat. In the coming decades, farmers may not be able to grow enough food to meet the demands of the world's growing population, it warns.

So next I turned to the WGII report to see what it stated about crop yields.  Chapter 7 is the one about food security and food production system - for people (like me) who find this latest report even harder to navigate than WGI.

As an aside, why couldn't the IPCC just release a single file and one with chapter labels as well as numbers! It takes forever to search each chapter separately when looking for a particular quote.  I'd have consolidated the separate chapters into a single document myself except that the files are protected in a way that makes it virtually impossible. And since the IPCC in its wisdom didn't provide a single file, why not have the chapter numbers beside the chapter titles on the web page? Tip: put your mouse over the link beside each chapter title to find out the chapter number. Update - here's a better page which has chapter numbers and titles.)

Be grateful for what we've got I suppose.  At least the report is out on time.  Here is some of what is in the report regarding crop yields:

Studies have documented a large negative sensitivity of crop yields to extreme daytime temperatures around 30°C. [Chapter 5 AR4, 7.3.2.1.1] These sensitivities have been identified for several crops and regions and exist throughout the growing season (high confidence). 

This is probably the part that caught Tony Barboza's attention (my bold italics):

Many studies of cropping systems have estimated impacts of observed climate changes on crop yields over the past half century, although they typically do not attempt to compare observed yields to a counterfactual baseline, and thus are not formal detection and attribution studies. These studies employ both mechanistic and statistical approaches (7.3.1), and estimate impacts by running the models with observed historical climate and then computing trends in modelled outcomes. Based on these studies, there is medium confidence that climate trends have negatively affected wheat and maize production for many regions (Figure 7-2) (medium evidence, high agreement). Since many of these regional studies are for major producers, and a global study (Lobell et al. 2011) estimated negative impacts on these crops, there is also medium confidence for negative impacts on global aggregate production of wheat and maize. Effects on rice and soybean yields have been small in major production regions and globally (Figure 7-2) (medium evidence, high agreement). There is also high confidence that warming has benefitted crop production in some high-latitude regions, such as Northeast China or the United Kingdom Jaggard et al., 2007, Supit et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2010; Gregory and Marshall, 2012).

Yield is affected by growing conditions as well as by planting improved varieties.  Plant breeders continue to develop new varieties with improved yield in some crops.  But plant breeding can only go so far.  Determining what yield would have been like without global warming is not straightforward.

Not only that, but yield is only part of the equation.   To feed the world requires a growth in total production (total quantity harvested), not just yield (quantity harvested per hectare).  If areas of land become unsuitable for growing particular crops because yield drops too much, then either new areas will have to take up the slack or there'll be less of that crop to go around.

Anthony Watts and Roy Spencer pointed me to the USDA website that has quite a bit of information about crops, total production and yield.  I  drew up some charts - which I must admit don't inspire confidence in our ongoing ability to feed a growing world population.  I've picked out a few of the most common field crops - corn (maize), wheat, barley, oats, sorghum and rice.

Yield of selected field crops

First let's look at yield. That's what Anthony wrote about and that's what was mentioned in the LA Times article. I suggest clicking on the chart to enlarge it.

Data Source: USDA

What the chart suggests is that corn yield continues to improve linearly. Wheat has had its heyday. Yield continues to improve but not like it did up to around the mid 1990s. Sorghum isn't making any great strides at all. Rice has picked up a bit after a lull in the late 1990s.

The question that the IPCC would like addressed is whether or not the yield is being adversely affected by global warming.  You can't tell that from the charts.  You'd need to separate out the yield improvements as a result of plant breeding and crop management from any effect of climate.  In other words, if global warming wasn't happening, would the yield be greater or less than it is.

Total production of selected field crops

Next have a look at the total production of the same field crops.  Here is the result:

Data Source: USDA

Once again, corn is the clear leader, with a huge hike in total production in the past few years. Wheat is tapering off. Rice has moved back toward the trend line. Oats and barley are in decline and sorghum is fairly steady.

Area harvested

Lastly, consider the area harvested for the same crops.

Data Source: USDA

Looking at the chart, the area planted to corn has gone up in the last few years in particular. Putting this chart together with the other two, corn has a double advantage - more area planted plus considerable improvement in yield. Wheat on the other hand has to rely on yield improvements because the area planted has shrunk compared to the late 1970s. Rice growing continues to expand.  Oats and barley are quite out of favour, while sorghum is only slowly declining.

What does this mean? Keeping pace with a growing population.

These field crops are only interchangeable to a limited extent from a cropping perspective. Corn and rice needs lots of water. Wheat, oats and barley can be grown as dryland crops but they need moisture to germinate. They don't want too much rain when the grain is ripening or they'll get all sorts of fungal infestations and other problems. Sorghum can grow where other crops can't, but there are a lot of different types suiting different conditions.  In other words, when climate changes - autumn or spring rains are no longer reliable, or the summer is wet instead of dry, or there are extended periods of drought and the irrigation water is no longer available - then production drops in that region, or even ceases entirely.

The reason I'm not encouraged is that looking at wheat for example, it suggests that any growth in total production will come down to continued improvements in plant yield, not in area planted.  There is only so much improvement before yield improvements start to taper off.  But the human population is still increasing.

Different areas are suited to different types of agriculture.  There isn't a lot of land about that can be converted to cropping.  Some horticultural land will probably shift to field crops as climate changes. I'm thinking particularly of my home state, where horticultural production needs irrigation.  Our region is going to keep getting hotter and drier. Water will become more scarce and more costly. That will mean a shift in production. So we may get wheat instead of cherries. (Well, more likely wheat instead of citrus or wine.)

On the other hand, in the marginal cropping land in some regions, farmers are giving up. Wheat has been grown on marginal land in south western australia - and that's getting drier.

I'm not going any further with this for now.  There is more on the topic in WGII (Chapter 7). Just thought it worth an article because we need to eat.  And if production doesn't keep pace with the growing world population then food prices will rise and food will become scarce.  This will have lots of flow on effects such as famine, civil unrest and mass migration. Plus large areas of land may be left unmanaged, with consequent damage to the environment.

From the WUWT comments

There were lots of people who moaned that newspapers and journalists don't check facts.  Ironic, eh? The journalist wrote what was in the IPCC report. It was the WUWT crowd who didn't check the facts - they just lapped up what Anthony Watts and Roy Spencer fed them, without question.  Without checking it for meaning or accuracy.


Billy Ruff'n says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:35 am
You’re letting facts get in the way of feelings….

Peter Miller probably knows "where to look" but was too lazy.  He says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:36 am
The facts are boring and don’t sell newspapers, but scary unfounded stories sell newspapers.
It is probably no more than this. Also, the hack was too lazy to check the facts, or so uninformed and pig ignorant that he did not know where to look.

Brian R probably means every word he writes and speaks on behalf of all WUWT-ers when he says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:40 am
Facts? We don’t need no stinking FACTS! 

JimS wouldn't make a good reporter because he says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:45 am
The difference between a good reporter and a poor one is this: a good reporter checks the facts; a poor one doesn’t. It seems as though the AGW movement, if we can call it that, survives and thrives because the quality of good media reporting has dropped considerably. 

James Ard might have made a fool of himself after he says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:48 am
Will the refutation of their just plain wrong claims be allowed in their letters to the editor?

Col Mosby, who seems to use only half his brain (if that), decides to have a crack at the journalist's name and says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:39 am
Tony Barboza is a name I expect to see on the back of a boxer’s robe. Sounds like his aspirations significantlly exceed his mental abilities. “Hey, with haf a brain, I coulda’ been somebody.”

RM3 Frisker FTN opts for "CO2 is plant food", ignoring the fact that excessive heat kills plants and crops need water, and says:

April 1, 2014 at 11:47 am
Maybe we could convince Lord Mockton to write a post that again uses the graph showing both CO2 vs Time and Temperature Anomaly vs Time with the thirteen plus year pause while CO2 continues to climb. Further in the post would be a second graph showing Agriculture Yields vs Time and CO2 vs Time, illustrating the correlation between CO2 concentration growth and Agriculture Yields. In other words CO2 equals Plant Food. QED via the Correlation yields Causation logic of the Alarmists.

Mac the Knife goes for a conspiracy ideation and says:

April 1, 2014 at 12:01 pm
“Maybe he’s just too lazy to check facts like this? Or, is it belief mixed with incompetence?”
The third possibility is a willingness to ‘shade the truth’ sufficiently to create a perception of alarm…. and sell more subscriptions to secure his paycheck.

TheMightyQuinn plays the poor victim and says:

April 1, 2014 at 12:09 pm
Tony did his job. He spread fear so the Progressive boot can be pressed against our necks.

rw is an "ice age comether" and says:

April 1, 2014 at 12:27 pm
If it keeps getting colder, we will see crop reductions. So Tony may have his predictions right even if he’s a bit off regarding causation. 

I read through every single comment and only one person, mark 543, had checked the facts or looked at the IPCC WGII report itself.  One or two others picked it up later in the discussion but in the main, the WUWT commenters are a bunch of mindless m....