Deltoid

Rather than a hoax, her article is simply a piece of fraudulent journalism submitted to Quadrant under false pretences.

And Windschuttle is still a skeptical skeptic filled with skeptical skepticism! If he got hoodwinked by a hoax piece of fraudulent journalism^[1], it's not his fault for being a gullible idiot. It's the fault of ... ... ... liberals.

^{[1] well, it's the same either way...}

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 6, 2009 11:44 AM

There is some irony in Windy being tripped up by inattention to footnotes, but beyond that its a pretty unimpressive prank IMHO. Quadrant deserves what it gets for its AGW pseudoscience line but there is a greater irony there that the hoaxer's stated aim was to bravely show chinks in the empirical armor of scientists (how original ...) when the only people who do and can take down Quadrant for its nonsense are ... scientists.

Posted by: Amanda | January 6, 2009 12:55 PM

What is the larger objective of the hoax? Is it to expose Windschuttle as a gullible ignoramus (done) or is to attack biotech, especially genetically modified organisms? Is this part of a bio-Luddite agenda of banning GMOs? I don't know.

The Sokal hoax was not just directed against Social Text, which was simply a convenient vehicle for the bogus article, but postmodernist sociology of scientific knowledge in general. Likewise, the hoax article about preference for blondes which appeared in Medical Hypotheses was not directed against the journal so much as against the field of evolutionary psychology.

Posted by: Colugo | January 6, 2009 1:49 PM

Does this suggest that Bob Carter is soon to be revealed as a clever hoax?

Please?

Posted by: Gareth | January 6, 2009 4:25 PM

Much as I enjoy seeing Quadrant embarrassed, Sokal this aint. Hell, this isn't even in the league of Swift's "A Modest Proposal".

The piece, even on a second inspection, really doesn't come across as a hoax at all. The references are real, and while the claims made about them certainly are far fetched, I've read far more logically inconsistent.

In addition, the piece doesn't really seem to land itself in Quadrant's corner. The embrace of "expert" advice given in the article really goes against the grain in Quadrant, which publishes pieces that reject the scientific consensus on climate change for reasons of ideology.

So maybe Windshuttle should be more rigorous when it comes to checking references. But as an editor, he's probably quite time poor, and (obviously) not an expert in the myriad of fields that articles appearing in Quadrant focus on. And as Andrew Norton notes, the article did not seem to have a great prominence in Quadrant, appearing on page 70.

Colour me unimpressed.

Posted by: ChrisC | January 6, 2009 4:45 PM

The Australian has the story on the front page of today's edition. It's actually quite balanced.

Posted by: Chris Nedin | January 6, 2009 6:51 PM

I think all this is going to achieve is get Quadrant some free publicity and perhaps a few additional subscribers. Quite frankly, I don't know anyone who actually reads this publication.

Posted by: Jimmy Nightingale | January 6, 2009 8:07 PM

And it wasn't this article by Tim Curtin...

Amazing, a hoax and an article by a nutcase in the one issue. What a magazine.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 7, 2009 12:13 AM

Isn't Windshuttle's culpability mainly to do with the fact that he failed to discover that the author didn't exist? My understanding is that Sharon Gould is entirely fictional and that a short phone call or even a quick google might have roused his suspicions (I did it and apart from results about the hoax found nothing).

Posted by: Tom | January 7, 2009 1:55 AM

Jason Soon (Catallaxy) makes a pretty strong case for the hoaxer being Katherine Wilson, who used to blog around the place as 'weathergirl'.

Posted by: skepticlawyer | January 7, 2009 4:48 AM

Having footnotes is interesting, but enough familiarity with the literature to ensure that a paper says what the author claims it does, is important (and would eliminate the AGW denialist and creationist literature)

IME having footnotes means, to the I-wish-to-believe-because-this-comports-with-my-worldview crowd, that the talking points in the piece are equivalent to stone tablets handed down from the clouds. That is: Lomborg's book has over 3,000 footnotes!!!!!!!!!!!! WoooOOOOWWWWW! Look at the enviros squirrrrrrrm!!!!

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | January 7, 2009 11:06 AM

In 1973 Robert Mayne writing in the Natonal Times in the wake of the Murphy raid on A.S.I.O., claimed that he had been approached by a group of people including: a senior A.S.I.O officer, a N.S.W. Liberal M.L.A. and a Country Party M.L.C. who offered to pay him $1000 per year to produce a magazine called "Anaysis" which would use A.S.I.O. information to "discredit left wingers".The Liberal M.L.A. said that he had used similar information in Parliament and in articles that he had written. A subsequent Royal Commission into Intelligence and Security outed the Liberal M.L.A. as Peter Coleman, one time Opposition Leader and longtime(1967-1990)editor of Quadrant. What a scurrilous tradition your squalid little rag has Keith. No wonder its a fav of JWH.

Posted by: Bomba | January 8, 2009 10:10 PM

Tim Curtin:

Arrhenius was famous as a polymath and it is unlikely he knew nothing of Malthus

In other words:

1. Arrhenius 'probably' knew about Malthus.
2. Ergo, this proves that Arrhenius borrowed his greenhouse effect formulation from Malthus.
3. Ergo, global warming is a myth.

Aristotle will be proud, my friends.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 11, 2009 11:34 AM

Tim Curtin writes:

Thanks bi-IJI for your as ever erudite contribution: "Arrhenius 'probably' knew about Malthus. Ergo, this proves that Arrhenius borrowed his greenhouse effect formulation from Malthus." Disprove it, mate.

Curtin, do you even know what Arrhenius's "greenhouse formulation" was? Malthus said exactly nothing about greenhouse gases. He certainly didn't have Arrhenius's detailed model, which included the band information available at the time and a scheme to account for water vapor feedback.

You added:"Ergo, global warming is a myth". Bad luck, old boy. Arrhenius claimed that 50% more atmospheric CO2 would raise global mean temps by over 3oC. We have just about managed 50% since his time, but even Gauleiter Belsen has not been able to report a global temp rise since 1896 of more than 0.73oC. Ever heard of Karl Popper?

Ever heard of aerosols? Or the ocean?

Yes, Arrhenisus's estimate for climate sensitivity was probably too high -- 6 K per doubling, as I recall. The actual figure is probably closer to 3 K. That's still a disaster for human agriculture and the economy.

Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | January 15, 2009 9:09 AM

"what is your rebuttal of my regression analysis of..."

That correlation is not causation, that it never has been, and that it never will be; and that anyone who implies that it is is ignorant, stupid, dishonest, a crank, or some combination thereof.

Posted by: George Smiley | January 24, 2009 1:33 PM

What is interesting and indisputable is that Arrhenius used virtually the same words as Malthus to describe his formulation of the effect of increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 on global mean temperature.

Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population:

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. [...]

allow that, by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the Island like a garden.

Yet this ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical.

It may be fairly said, therefore, that the means of subsistence increase in an arithmetical ratio. [...]

But we should be led into an error if we were thence to suppose that population and food ever really increase in the same ratio. The one is still a geometrical and the other an arithmetical ratio, that is, one increases by multiplication, and the other by addition. [...]

Arrhenius, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, Philosophical Magazine:

Thus if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

Tim Curtin should've testified at SCO v. IBM.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 25, 2009 1:59 AM

Apologies, there's a misprint. The world population index as of 2007 (1961=100) is 211.11. BTW, the CO2 emissions index as of 2007 stood at 245 (again 1961=100). Prima facie, there appears to be a closer match between the emissions and cereal production than between emissions and temperature, but one should never believe that, should one?

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 25, 2009 7:09 AM

Tim Curtin:

Thanks Bi. So how are Malthus and Arrhenius doing?

You still haven't remotely proven your claim that Arrhenius borrowed his formulation from Malthus.

Or are you saying that the use of variants of the words "increase", "in", "geometric", "arithmetic" is a clear indication of plagiarism?

As I said, you should've testified at SCO v. IBM.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 25, 2009 9:50 AM

grant application for test of effect of carbon doxide concentration on food crop production:

we aim to take two identical planets equidistant from the sun and raise the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere of one, while stabilizing its climate to not change in response (methods to be determined later). global food crop production of both planets will be harvested and weighed.

budget extimate: 100 gajillion dollars per year, for ten years.

Posted by: z | January 25, 2009 9:00 PM

Bi: the variables differ, the formulation is identical. Prove that Arrhenius had never heard of Malthus or read his book. My evidence that he had is his use of the same formulation pari passu. Both were and are wrong.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 26, 2009 12:49 AM

For those in any doubt, when I referred to "a CO2-constrained experimental situation" in post #40 above, I was referring to experimentation where CO₂ is the only factor limiting photosynthesis, and thus the only factor to modify the photosynthetic response as CO₂ concentration changes.

And for any who followed the comments about Arrhenius without knowledge of his 'formulation', his estimations of climate sensitivity were that halving of CO₂ would decrease temperatures by 4 - 5°C and a doubling of CO₂ would cause a temperature rise of 5 - 6°C.

I'd challenge any Denialist to do as well given the same circumstances as Arrhenius, were it actually possible to do with the confounding of hindsight.

It's simply churlishness to denigrate the man's work. Especially so when one considers the time it took to refine estimates of such simple constants as the speed of light, the distance of the earth to the sun, the value of pi, et cetera.

The Nobel committee certainly thought that Arrhenius did OK...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 26, 2009 2:29 AM

Tim Curtin.

I grant that my choice of "pin[ning] the matter to one of scientists who claim that..." was a poor phrasing of my point. These things happen to all of us when we type at length in blog posts, and I would be surprised if you didn't understand this at some level.

Nevertheless, my original question to you stands, and with it my intent to demonstrate that there are probably fewer mainstream scientists denying a complete lack of relationship between atmospheric CO₂ concentration and photosynthetic productivity, than there are contrarians who maintain that atmospheric CO₂ increases will not warm the planet.

To that end, I am still interested in your knowledge of people who have published material, in Nature or in Science or in similar journals, supporting this position.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 26, 2009 5:39 AM

In his article, Tim Curtin writes, "Malthus has long since been proved wrong about food production, which has grown exponentially even faster than population, so that the recurring starvation and population wipe-outs that Malthus feared have yet to materialise".

Given that there are more starving people on Earth than the number of people alive in 1930, and that the health of every important indicator of ecosystem quality across the biosphere is in decline, its folly for anyone to make such a loaded remark as this. This perfectly epitimizes Paul Ehrlich's comment, that its akin to someone jumping off of the Empire State Building, falling 75 floors, looking up an saying "Everything's fine!"

The two most important factors are these: 1. Technology has delayed the inevitable ecological crash; Earth is a closed system and humans (primarily the privileged few in the developed world) are living off of a one-time inheritanace of natural capital. To support the current population load, our species is degrading biodiversity (the working parts of our ecological life-support systems), deep rich agricultural soils, and groundwater levels. 2. Consequently, in some respects at a systemic level, we have not yet passed a critical threshold beyond which ecological systems are unable to support themselves and us. But many vital ecological services are in a worrying state of decline, and since complex adaptive systems function non-linearly, when that threshold is passed, then things will fail and fail quite quickly. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in denial or delusion. The trouble is that the vast majority of those espousing the 'Malthus was wrong' line apparently do not understand basic environmental science. If they did, they'd be much more circumspect in what they say.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 26, 2009 6:02 AM

Bernard J said "my original question to you stands, and with it my intent to demonstrate that there are probably fewer mainstream scientists denying a complete lack of relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and photosynthetic productivity, than there are contrarians who maintain that atmospheric CO2 increases will not warm the planet".

Dear Bernard, how about the 2500++ scientists of the IPCC's AR4 who call for massive reductions in [CO2], including above all Jim Hansen, who calls for reduction to a max of 350 ppm, not one of whom brings to account the effect of reduced CO2 fertilization on global food production? The IPCC grudgingly admits in a few places that rising [CO2] does have a fertilization effect, but not that reducing [CO2] must reduce that effect - see for example AR4, p186 and p.526-7 for some weasel words on this subject, desperately downplaying the fertilization effect of enhanced [CO2] in order to infer (without saying so) that reducing [CO2] would have no impact on primary productivity. These pages are transparently biased and do not provide accurate accounts of the papers they refer to. The same applies to the Stern & Garnaut reports.

I reported my own regression of world food production 1980-2003 against [CO2], and global mean Temps in my submission to the Garnaut Review; it showed an adjusted R2 of .98 with the only significant coefficient being that on [CO2], after taking into account auto-correlation tests. Adding commercial fertilizer consumption data, the regression results derived from the data in Table 1 show very high values for the adjusted R2, at 0.99 and for F at 799.97, and a large and strongly significant coefficient (5.76) on CO2, with the t statistic at 36.06. Perhaps surprisingly, the coefficient on fertilizers is marginally negative (-0.047) but not significant (t = -0.67), while that on temperature is larger (0.365) and positive, but also not statistically significant (because t=0.767 so <2). The large negative value for the intercept (–507.9965) represents the negative food production index that would arise if there were zero values for fertilizer use, global temperature, and atmospheric CO2.

William Cline (2007) has reported much larger [CO2] fertilization than the IPCC will admit to but like them and Hansen does not grasp that reducing [CO2] must reduce that fertilization. Hansen has yet to explain why the world economy has suffered irretrievable damage from the rise in [CO2] from 280ppm to 385ppm and his GISS temp rise since 1896 of 0.73oC, and will benefit more from any cooling arising from reducing [CO2] to 350ppm or less than from the loss of the fertilization effect.

As for your bleat about "contrarians who maintain that atmospheric CO2 increases will not warm the planet", who do you mean?

Your list cannot include Bjorn Lomborg, who only today said this: "Make no mistake - global warming is real, and it is caused by manmade CO2 emissions. The problem is that even global, draconian, and hugely costly CO2 reductions will have virtually no impact on the temperature by mid-century. Instead of ineffective and costly cuts, we should focus much more of our good climate intentions on dramatic increases in R&D for zero-carbon energy, which would fix the climate towards mid-century at low cost...." (CCNet 13/2009 - 26 January 2009 -- Audiatur et altera pars) I don't agree with Lomborg on his R&D push, but do agree with his further statements that there are more serious problems (eg Malaria, AIDS) which have been supported by real peer-reviewed Nobel prize winners in terms of cost-benefit analysis.

I cannot see how a rise of 3oC in say Dubai (to annual mean of 30oC) will make that place any more uncomfortable than it already is, while such an increase in Glasgow or Helsinki would bring unbounded joy. In no place in the world will there be any demonstrable hardship to compare with the lower global food production that will result either from reduction in [CO2]or from forgoing future increases in [CO2].

Barton Paul Levenson: I have offered a sample of my evidence here to support my theory; it is for you to produce the refutation, not me, all the data are in the public domain (e.g. FAO, CDIAC) - and that is the way science works.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 26, 2009 8:26 AM

Tim Curtin,

Why oh why must you rely on Lomborg to bolster your inane views? Lomborg doesn't understand the link between then natural and material economies, so he dismisses them. You promulgate nonsense suggesting enhanced atmospheric CO 2 concentrations will ehance primary productivity, when the vast majority of environmental scientists (me included, you excluded) dismiss such a link because it ignores non-linear effects and other aspects of plant stoichiometry and effects on higher trophic levels. How many times does it have to be said: carbon is often not a limiting nutrient: nitrogen is. As one increases concentrations of atmospheric CO 2, nitrogen (as well as phosporus) is shunted out of plant tissues. The C:N ratio increases. This will affect the behavior and development of associated consumers, because for their ontogeny N is often limiting - a decrease in foliar N will often be accompanied by compensatory feeding (e.g. increased herbivory) or a reduction in fitness, with all kinds of consequences for species in interacting webs. Moreover, C is not limiting for many plants, either. I don't expect you to understand this but please refrain from this frankly absurd and unscientific notion that increasing atmospheric levels of C creates a green utopia. IT DOES NOT.

For once why don't you read the primary scientific literature, and in particular papers dealing with stoichiometry. It is an area I am working on empirically in a multitrophic framework and I find it seriously annoying when people espouse this kind of simplistic clap-trap re: CO 2 and primary production. Plants do not occur in isolation: they interact with other species in food webs that vary in their spatial and temporal complexity.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 26, 2009 11:24 AM

Tim Curtin writes:

I reported my own regression of world food production 1980-2003 against [CO2], and global mean Temps in my submission to the Garnaut Review; it showed an adjusted R2 of .98 with the only significant coefficient being that on [CO2], after taking into account auto-correlation tests. Adding commercial fertilizer consumption data, the regression results derived from the data in Table 1 show very high values for the adjusted R2, at 0.99 and for F at 799.97, and a large and strongly significant coefficient (5.76) on CO2, with the t statistic at 36.06. Perhaps surprisingly, the coefficient on fertilizers is marginally negative (-0.047) but not significant (t = -0.67), while that on temperature is larger (0.365) and positive, but also not statistically significant (because t=0.767 so

Very impressive, Tim. Do you know what "stationarity" means in statistics? Are your food and CO2 series integrated? If so, are they cointegrated? If not, have you differenced them appropriately and rerun the regression? Have you ever heard of the "spurious regression problem?"

This should be good.

Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | January 26, 2009 12:01 PM

Tim Curtin.

First up, I have commented a number of times in the past about the incorrect use of the term 'fertilisation' to describe CO₂ assimilation during photosynthesis.

CO₂ is a substrate for photosynthesis. As indicated above by Ian Forrester it can sometimes be the rate-limiting substrate, and hence increases in its concentration on these occasions will lead to increases in photosynthetic output.

However this does not make it a fertiliser, a formal definition of which I have provided to you in the past. To paraphrase such definitions here yet again, they are considered by mainstream plant physiologists/biochemists to refer so soil-borne nutrients, natural or synthetic, that enhance plant yield...

...by shifting upward, or removing entirely, some of the non-CO₂ limitations to photosynthesis. Of course, it should be remembered that temperature, light intensity and photoperiod, and moisture are also rate-limiting factors in photosynthesis - which raises an interesting question: are you are going to claim that each of these is also a fertiliser? Oh, and oxygen too is required for plant growth, although most people do not appreciate this - is it a fertiliser? Given your concern for putting extra CO₂ into the atmosphere, how many tons of oxygen might be concerningly lost from the atmosphere as CO₂ increases?

Another way of thinking about it is that fertilisers are generally the chemicals required for plant growth exclusive of CO₂, oxygen and water, the 'essential' substrates/products of carbohydrate synthesis/catabolism.

The CO₂ 'fertiliser' meme seems to have arisen from the agricultural/horticultural industries, where the use of descriptors to refer to biological processes is much more loose than in science. However this does not mean that it is OK to use the 'loose' versions of such definitions, because to do so conflates very different biological concepts and processes, and in the current debate it is very important to be clear about these concepts and processes.

Your confusion about the biochemical and ecological dynamics of photosynthesis demonstrates exactly why precise definitions are important, even if such might seem to you to be a semantic nit-pick.

Of course, for those who wish to obfuscate the profound negative consequences of increasing atmospheric CO₂, similar obfuscation of definitions is a very useful FUD tool.

Ian above, and myself previously, have indicated to you that the CO₂ photosynthetic response curves for plant species do not directly imply that, in the real world, it is simply a matter of upping CO₂, and consequently upping productivity. Even FACE projects fail to account for many confounders. The feedbacks, the compensatory mechanisms, and the shifted rate-limiting components of photosynthesis make the picture much more complex in the 'real world', which is where you seem to be emphasising its importance - id et, 'global productivity'.

And if you are going to speak of 'global productivity', you need to include in your considerations the all of the alterations to the global ecology that accompany increases atmospheric CO₂, as Jeff, I and others have mentioned above, and in many previous discussions of the subject in past threads. Between the complexities of the photosynthetic processes of plants themselves, and of these processes' biochemical and ecological sequelæ, the concept of CO₂-enhanced productivity is vastly more fraught that you show any appreciation for.

And to follow on from Barton's curiosity about your analyses, I would like to know how you account for increases in human numbers, in changes in technology and in land use, when you derive your correlations with global 'productivity'.

I am especially interested in how you have determined that such correlations are not spurious.

And I am also very curious to know how much productivity increase in natural systems, over the same time spans, you have investigated by way of comparison, and as an analytical control. How have you broken down the trophic levels of global food webs to determine where productivity increases (if it does), and where it decreases? Have you teased out where natural systems' productivities are modified by other anthropogenic impacts to the biosphere? How have you analysed such natural system changes for implications to human agricultural systems?

I could ask paragraphs more of similar questions, but these are more than enough for a start. Thus far you have reflected the profound difficulty economists have in dealing with externalities, and at best you demonstrate a clumsy and disturbing naïvety of the biochemistry and ecology of photosynthetic processes, and how they might be co-opted to bolt onto your economic memes.

And that's 'at best'.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 26, 2009 7:36 PM

Bernard: many thanks for all your comments, much appreciated. According to the OED, Fertilize = (2) to render productive, and this is the sense clearly used by the IPCC in the pages I referenced as well as by all the many papers I have copies of testifying to and demonstrating this effect of enhanced [CO2] using a wide range of controlled experiments, varying temperature, other nutrients, water etc etc. If one began a trial with no oxygen present, yield would not be great; adding it would "render productive". Really you are splitting hairs. Or were CSIRO's Crimp et al in their report for Garnaut guilty of FUD when documenting the impact of future enhanced [CO2] on wheat yields, which confirms the work an associate and I have done regressing historic wheat yields at various locations in Australia against [CO2] and rainfall since 1959.

Re your mention of population growth, I have included it in one of my runs for global food production, and its coefficient is negative but insignificant. What I need from you and Barton and Forrester is regression showing that the acknowledged sixfold growth of terrestrial absorption of CO2 emissions since 1958 has NOT "rendered productive". If it did not so do, what did it do? That is what my prize is for.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 26, 2009 9:18 PM

So

arithmetical ratio

is "identical" to

arithmetic progression?

Bi: you are clutching at straws, give me your definitions of those terms as Malthus would have understood them.

In other words, you still have zero hard evidence of your initial strong claim that "Arrhenius took over this [Malthus's] formulation". Clutching at straws, indeed...

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 27, 2009 4:28 AM

Thanks Jeff, but you should address your comments to the authors of the paper cited by Ian. I merely cited their results showing I am right. Howver it is true that there is a pro forma issued by PNAS, Nature, and Science which contains the following words to be included in the final sentence whatever the paper actually shows, as in the Crafts-Brandner & Salvucci paper: xyz "should be considered in predicting [abcd] in response to global climate changes"; similar wording is also mandatory in the abstract. The body of the paper as in this case need have no bearing at all on the pro forma. Actually the C-B & S paper did exactly what you propose: "we need to go beyond simple controlled physiological experiments and determine the impacts of enhanced C02 (and temperature) regimes on systems...". That is what they did, with some very sophisticated experiments and the results I reported.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 27, 2009 5:16 AM

Sorry, that should have read "you can't go by correlation alone" above. The point being that correlation can be spurious, and the "spurious regression problem" arises again and again where you have both time series growing with time. Tim Curtin's comment that his relation passes "the latter," implying that he got a good D.W. but not a DF or ADF test, further implies that his relation is spurious. When you discover integration, you have to address it by differencing until you no longer get integration. That or you have to show cointegration between the two series. As far as I can tell, T.C. hasn't done either.

There's a reason just showing good regression equations isn't enough to get you into a science journal any more. You could do that easily in the 1950s and '60s, but then people started noticing that the Keynesians and the Monetarists were each getting lovely regressions with high R^2 for relations that flatly contradicted one another. The Durbin-Watson and the later Durbin's h were the start of looking at ways to address the problem, but it wasn't until the concept of stationarity was nailed down, along with valid tests to test for it and correct for a lack of it, that scientists were able to tell good regressions from spurious ones. A lot of what we thought we knew about economic time series -- like the old Phillips Curve -- turned out to be just wrong.

Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | January 27, 2009 2:45 PM

I said to Curtin:

In other words, you still have zero hard evidence of your initial strong claim that "Arrhenius took over this [Malthus's] formulation". Clutching at straws, indeed...

Hear the crickets.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 27, 2009 2:51 PM

So I sez:

I am especially interested in how you have determined that such correlations are not spurious. (#54)

and so far the best Tim Curtin has responded with is:

I reported my own regression of world food production 1980-2003 against [CO2], and global mean Temps in my submission to the Garnaut Review; it showed an adjusted R2 of .98 with the only significant coefficient being that on [CO2], after taking into account auto-correlation tests. Adding commercial fertilizer consumption data, the regression results derived from the data in Table 1 show very high values for the adjusted R2, at 0.99 and for F at 799.97, and a large and strongly significant coefficient (5.76) on CO2, with the t statistic at 36.06. Perhaps surprisingly, the coefficient on fertilizers is marginally negative (-0.047) but not significant (t = -0.67), while that on temperature is larger (0.365) and positive, but also not statistically significant (because t=0.767 so [less than] 2). The large negative value for the intercept (–507.9965) represents the negative food production index that would arise if there were zero values for fertilizer use, global temperature, and atmospheric CO2. (#48)

Barton cuts to the bone when he points out:

The point being that correlation can be spurious, and the "spurious regression problem" arises again and again where you have both time series growing with time. Tim Curtin's comment that his relation passes "the latter," implying that he got a good D.W. but not a DF or ADF test, further implies that his relation is spurious. When you discover integration, you have to address it by differencing until you no longer get integration. That or you have to show cointegration between the two series. As far as I can tell, T.C. hasn't done either. There's a reason just showing good regression equations isn't enough to get you into a science journal any more. You could do that easily in the 1950s and '60s, but then people started noticing that the Keynesians and the Monetarists were each getting lovely regressions with high R^2 for relations that flatly contradicted one another. The Durbin-Watson and the later Durbin's h were the start of looking at ways to address the problem, but it wasn't until the concept of stationarity was nailed down, along with valid tests to test for it and correct for a lack of it, that scientists were able to tell good regressions from spurious ones. A lot of what we thought we knew about economic time series -- like the old Phillips Curve -- turned out to be just wrong. (#62)

So Tim Curtin, once again, how have you determined that your correlations are not spurious? The question pertains to the complementary scenarios – directly to correlations where there appears to be a relationship between one parameter with another, and conversely to situations where, through potential confoundment, it appears that there is no direct relationship between the parameters.

It is important that you be very clear about this, because you making a claim about an entire planetary phenomenon, that global agricultural production is best increased by increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration, whilst simultaneously dismissing many other accepted productivity modes.

Oh, and because it is such a profoundly encompassing claim to make, I presume that you have applied your calculations to novel data sets to see if the trends in your correlations are similarly reflected. I know that this skirts close to delving into the concept of 'modelling', but you shouldn't have any problem with that, surely? After all, no analyst worth his salt would draw a conclusion about the dynamics of a global phenomenon on the basis of a few regressions.

William Cline (2007) has reported much larger [CO2] fertilization...

Ad nauseum repetition of your interpretation of fertilisation, OED notwithstanding, does not alter the fact of your obfuscation of the existence and of the scientifically understood definitions of different types of photosynthetic input and enhancement.

If you persist in maintaining this usage, perhaps you should also consider promoting the idea that we don't actually water our gardens and crops, but rather that we fertilise them with dihydrogen monoxide.

... than the IPCC will admit to but like them and Hansen does not grasp that reducing [CO2] must reduce that fertilization.

Evidence for this accusation?

And "reducing" compared with what? If we do manage to put the brakes on further increases of atmospheric CO₂, we would still have more atmospheric CO₂ that at any time for the existence of human civilisation, and you have yet to demonstrate that net photosynthesis is going to increase with the combination of the current levels of atmospheric CO₂ and the climate alterations that are in train but have yet to manifest due to climatic inertia.

Oh, I see. You have somehow determined the asymptotes for all global climatic sequelæ, for all possible peaks of atmospheric CO₂, and have determined that all possible negative consequences are still outweighed by the benefit of your putative photosynthetic productivity increase, which of course you know will occur in all species under all circumstances.

You must be one clever dick, Tim. Especially when you are able to do so without showing your working...

And just as an incidental:

Hansen has yet to explain why the world economy has suffered irretrievable damage from the rise in [CO2] from 280ppm to 385ppm and his GISS temp rise since 1896 of 0.73oC

Um, where has it been said that "irretrievable damage" was predicted to occur at the moment when atmospheric CO₂ reached 385ppm? Was the bit about climatic inertia printed in too small a font for you to see? Your use of "has suffered" is a mischievous strawman; "will suffer" is a much more pertinent phrasing.

and will benefit more from any cooling arising from reducing [CO2] to 350ppm or less than from the loss of the fertilization effect.

Again, "cooling" is a mischievous term, because it would in fact only be "un-warming", and there is a profound (if subtle) difference.

And for heaven's sake, why do you have this bee in your bonnet that altering the world's climate is the only way to achieve a possible increase in agricultural productivity? Are you dismissing out of hand the work of countless agriculturalists and scientists in achieving increased productivity in production without global alteration of the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the planet's climate?

Tim, I have to wonder how many times you have been shown the door by frustrated scientists in various fields. Assuming of course that you have had the wherewithall to even seek their advice in the first place.

If you are going to even attempt a serious foray into photosynthetic biochemistry and ecology you need to spend weeks, if not months or even years, speaking with experts in these fields, sitting down in tea-rooms and in offices and in laboratories and learning about the complexities and nuances of several discplines in which you currently have no experience.

You should write essays for assessment, and you should conduct your own experimentation to grasp the intricacies of the techniques and the limitations of the data you derive. You should write reports, again for assesment, and have your first attempts at a paper reviewed by practising plant physiologists before you can claim to have a greater understanding of the field than the many experts whom you contradict with your statements.

You should especially understand John Mashey's comment, from a day or so ago, that significant shifts in understanding do not come from people working outside of their fields of expertise. To this observation I would add that such shifts especially do not come from folk who are ignorant of just about the entire bodies of fact/knowledge of the fields which they are attempting to comment upon, and most esoecially so when they consistently demonstrate that they are prepared to not only ignore but to refute the best understanding of the experts in various scientific disciplines, and to do so without providing any credible evidence as a counter.

You are simply demonstrating no capacity for an even remotely structured approach to understanding this science, and until you do so your theories have no chance of withstanding scrutiny.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 27, 2009 8:57 PM

Bi: you said ‘In other words, you still have zero hard evidence of your initial strong claim that "Arrhenius took over this [Malthus's] formulation"’. For fun in my spare time between playing/watching tennis I have started doing some experiments taking over Arrhenius’ famous equation for analyzing electrolytic dissociation of salts. Is this wicked, plagiarism, or what? Or is nobody allowed to use (take over) either Malthus’ or Arrhenius’ formulae?

Richard Simons: references please to your own or other papers.

Bernard J. 1. You said: “When you discover integration, you have to address it by differencing until you no longer get integration…. or you have to show cointegration between the two series. As far as I can tell, T.C. hasn't done either.” The 2500 at IPCC have yet to reference a paper doing that for [CO2] and global mean temperature, which is why they prefer models that always tautologically yield perfectly cointegrated regressions. I am not going to anticipate here all sections of my forthcoming peer reviewed paper (including I am told by an IPCC 2007 lead author), so you will have to restrain your intemperance.

1. You also said I am “making a claim about an entire planetary phenomenon, that global agricultural production is best increased by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, whilst simultaneously dismissing many other accepted productivity modes”. That is not quite what I say, which is that there is huge evidence that rising [CO2] has been is and will continue to be (in the absence of ETS etc) beneficial for raising productivity at both global and local levels, including not only in Crimp & co at Garnaut Review, or Cline, but hundreds of other papers including the one linked to by Forrester on which more below. It is for you to show that enhanced [CO2] has zero effect (cet.par). on yields either in greenhouses, or in FACE field experiments.

2. I had said “Hansen does not grasp that reducing [CO2] must reduce that fertilization…” You asked for “Evidence for this accusation?” Well, try his letters to Rudd and Obama, or any of his publications since say PNAS 2004, where I can discern no recognition of any such benefit from increasing [CO2] or any recognition of any loss if we go back from today’s 385ppm to his ceiling of 350ppm. Both of these are suppressio veri worthy of Bernie Madoff, with whom Hansen has a lot in common.

3. Then you say I “have yet to demonstrate that net photosynthesis is going to increase with the combination of the current levels of atmospheric CO2 and the climate alterations that are in train but have yet to manifest due to climatic inertia”. The paper by Forrester’s authors noted again below, also Norby & Yuo, do this (Norby, R.J. and Y. Luo 2004. Evaluating ecosystem responses to rising atmospheric CO2 and global warming in a multi-factor world. New Phytologist 162: 281-293). I have also done the inventory analysis which shows how either continuing absorption of [CO2] at the present rate can easily deplete [CO2] to the 1750 level of 280 within 60 years if all emissions cease forthwith or by 2012 at latest as demanded by Hansen (in his letter to Barry and Mich Obama, 29 Dec 2008), and even sooner if we take into account the diminishing partial pressure of [CO2] under the Hansen programme, which will actually reduce Pn and crop yields worldwide. Just study Table 1 in the online version of my Quadrant article either at www.lavoisier.com.au, or the fuller version at Global Carbon Project, and work from the current flows to your own projections given your own preferred emission reduction targets.

The rest of your comments set up even more strawmen that are not worth comment.

Ian Forrester: You have yet to study your authors’ Fig.1 in depth. Whether at 210 or 10 mbar O2, Pn is higher at 45oC as CO2 increases from 280 to 550 to 750 to 1200 ppm (or mbar). It is true they keep changing the scale of the vertical axis to obscure this, I wonder why, and refuse to provide any of their data, but that is par for the course, but fortunately it is possible despite their obfuscation to verify what I have just said, which refutes what you claim when you say “As the CO2 concentration was increased (A>B>C>D) the difference increased meaning that there was less net photosynthesis than there would have been if the CO2 had not been increased.” Simply not true. Get a magnifying glass and note their changes in scale.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 27, 2009 11:30 PM

Tim Curtin (#68): "The 2500 at IPCC have yet to reference a paper doing that for [CO2] and global mean temperature, which is why they prefer models that always tautologically yield perfectly cointegrated regressions."

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

That's the best joke I've heard since the one about the two nuns on bicycles, Tim.

Posted by: Gaz | January 28, 2009 4:15 AM

Tim,

You creating a red-herring. As I said in my last post, you are rehashing the classic denialist strategy: so long as some process or its outcome is not fully known or understood, it does not exist. I was an editor at Nature and I never ever pressured an author into adding a pro-forma addition to the paper suggesting that the results should be viewed in a larger context or 'with caution'. I would like to know who told you that, if indeed anyone did. The authors do that themselves because they are acutely aware that one cannot often extrapolate conclusions that are broadly linear into complex, decidedly non-linear systems. All good scientists are very cautious about the conclusions they generate from their research and few would take the results of studies in closed systems and suggest that their results can easily be viewed in a braoder framework.

Moreover, you are also selective: there are many other studies (in PNAS for example) which suggest that the phenomena you glean from the PNAS study will have other effects and consequences on ecosystems that are hard to predict but could have serious repercussions for the way they function. Moreover, one of our PhD students here defended her thesis last month in which she examined the impact of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels on microbial community dynamics in the rhizosphere. She concluded:

"As opposed to simply increasing the activity of soil-borne microbes resident at ambient C02 conditions, elevated atmospheric C02 strongly selects for opportunistic plant-associated microbial communities, with a particular shift in the dominant arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi community as well as rhizosphere bacterial anbd fungal populations".

In other words, the dynmaics of these sytems changes, with winners and losers: increased atmospheric levels of C02 translate into strong, non-linear effects on important organisms in soil communities rendering these communities much more likely to break down. Rhizobacteria and mycorrhiza play a central role in the global change process, because they are key components in the response of terrestrial ecocystems to elevated atmospheric C02 levels. Ultimately, humans are playing with the carbon cycle, as well as cycles of othert key nutrients, processes which are generated over quite stupendously large scales. There will be and already are important ecological consequences, that involve changes in the structure and fucntion of ecological communities both in above- and belowground domains. Given that these interact, the outcome of such an experiment is hard to predict, but it is an illusion to argue that plant communities and especially crops will benefit and to leave it at that. I find it incredible that anyone would draw such a conclusion.

What you are doing by cherry-picking a few studies to support your arguments is to ignore many others that have generated very different and worrying conclusions. In this context, you are effectively saying that humans should continue along our current path, conducting a single non-replicatable experiment on systems we barely understand but which generate conditions that permit us to exist and persist. As a senior scientist I actually feel embarrassed to have to respond to such one-dimensional arguments which it is my opinion have a strongly political underpinning (e.g. promoting business-as-usual in the name of profit).

Ian, Tim, Bernard and others have countered the physiological arguments underpinning your views. My aim has been to take a step back and to view the effects on large scale systems. Its no use dismissing this with the refrain, "I should speak to the authors" - this does not cut ice with me. I am a qualified population ecologist and I can assure you that the effects you attempt to extrapolate will not necessarily create the green utopia you envisage. Complex adaptive systems just do not function in that way. In my opinion its actually up to those arguing for a continuation of the current global experiment to prove that its repercussions are benign. There's enough empirical evidence to show that they are not going to be. Biodiversity loss, declining soil quality, declining numbers of pollinators, declining groundwater supplies, rapidly changing regional temperature and rainfall regimes all indicate that we are going in the wrong direction.

Lastly, you should also know that the candiate of the excellent PhD I cited earlier argued in her thesis 'stellingen' that "Climate change is already happening and represents one of the greatest environmental, social and economic threats facing the planet".

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 28, 2009 10:19 AM

I just read Jeff Harvey's post.

Shorter Dano reading of Jeff: spare me your tired hasty generalization logical fallacies.

Jeff is, of course, too polite to be so blunt. But many of us tire of the same old tactics, recycled over and over.

Timmy's tactic was refuted years ago, put to bed, the building collapsed, the wood rotted and broke down into soil (where Jeff's student's mycorrhizæ went to work), crops were replanted and ethanol created. Jeff may have even commuted to work with this ethanol.

Who said denialists don't have the power to move us.

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | January 28, 2009 10:39 AM

My previous post was sent before completion, here is the rest its final point also answers Jeff.

BTW, you (Ian F) have have got the sequencing of CO2 in graphs A:D wrong, they are actually as follows: A<B<C<D, just like your authors got their paper's conclusions completely arse about. I wonder if you or they have ever been to the Gezira cotton scheme south of Khartoum as I have? Believe me it is often 45oC there and its cotton has thriven for over 80 years now. Even in spring (April-May) the mean max's are 41 and 41.5, rising to 45 and by August max can reach over 50. In the cooler winter they switch to wheat. If heat is so bad for cotton’s Rubisco as your authors claim, why does Gezira grow it only in the hottest months? (it is the largest single cotton operation the world).

Hi Bi: and you have yet to prove Arrhenius never did know of Malthus.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 28, 2009 3:27 PM

"Again for reasons not clear to me my last posts have been truncated"

HTML!

I think we all knew, but weren't going to tell you.

Posted by: P. Lewis | January 28, 2009 9:17 PM

Tim Curtin:

Hi Bi: and you have yet to prove Arrhenius never did know of Malthus.

Tim Curtin, I claim that I'm the Queen of England. Prove me wrong.

* * *

In other words, (yet again!) you still have zero hard evidence of your initial strong claim that "Arrhenius took over this [Malthus's] formulation".

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 28, 2009 10:31 PM

Bernard. I already have that in hand, but I was rather hoping that if I am wrong, by now you or Ian would have put me straight. Absence of any correction since my posting 24 hours ago implies that I am right so I will proceed as you suggest. Thanks for the encouragement.

Bi: I see that Arrhenius was a very keen eugenicist and favoured liquidating the unfit, like so many other neo-Malthusians then and now (eg FoE, ACF, and Greenpeace). Circumstantial evidence I grant you, but probably enough to secure a conviction.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 29, 2009 7:06 AM

Tim Curtin doesn t understand the basics. he believes, that the oceans will continue to take up immense amounts of CO2, even when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is reduced again.

basically he thinks that our whole planet will collapse, as soon as we stop burning fossil fuels.

pretty bizarre.

read his slideshow "Climate Change Mitigation - and mass starvation by 2050?"

http://www.timcurtin.com/

Posted by: sod | January 29, 2009 9:23 AM

Also, to suggest that mitigating climate change will result in mass starvation by 2050 is so absurd as to enter the comic book category.

Innnn THIS corner! Weighing innnn at a pale, pudgy 112 kilos! Hailllling from the Emerallllld Isle! The braaaaaaaaave Captain Carbon, fighting greeeeeen interests to ensure poor plants have their foooooood-uh so our chilllllldren can eat!

In the Grrrreeen! corner! Weighing in at an emaciated! hemmmmmpen-clad-uh 51 kilos! Haiiiiiiiling from-uh a collectiv-uh! in the windy heaths! The crrrrrrraven Guh-reeeeeeeen lobby!

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | January 29, 2009 10:29 AM

Further to my last, amazingly this week's PNAS confirms what I said ("I am however puzzled by your implicit faith that PNAS represents some kind of perfection, when it can easily be shown to be all too ready to publish any old rubbish on climate change and much else"). This issue (vol.106, no.6, 1704-1709) contains an article by the inimitable Sue Solomon, Co-Chair of WG1 and chief editor of their report for IPCC AR4, Climate Change 2007 The Physical Science Basis), along with Plattner, Knutti, and Friedlingstein, "Irreversible climate change due to CO2 emissions". This paper actually made my day, as it proves conclusively that even if all CO2 emissions cease tomorrow, there will be no global mean surface temperature falls before the year 3000. No need for Kyoto 2 or ETS etc, as they will have nil impact for a thousand years. Global droughts (especially across WA and north-eastern Australia, where the present floods are merely a harbinger of endemic drought for the next 1000 years, see their Fig.3) and sea level rise are inevitable even at the existing level of emissions, and are also irreversible for the next millennium even if emissions fall now to zero. As this is a tablet from the mountain. let's eat drink and be merry, for nothing we can do will achieve anything before 3000 because of the irreversibility "proved" by Sue - here is a direct paste from Sue's abstract: "This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop". No need for Wong to head for Copenhagen, where at most the aim will be to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050, as nothing agreed there will make a blind bit of difference for a thousand years. Although it goes against my grain, if adequately compensated and asked to join Penny there I will explain why the computations in the papers by Sue & friends (their equation 3) and those slumdogs Ramanathan & Feng (PNAS, again,105.38, 2008), which in part underpin Sue's wonderful finding, are fatally flawed.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | January 31, 2009 12:43 AM

Tim Curtin:

Bi: I see that Arrhenius was a very keen eugenicist and favoured liquidating the unfit, like so many other neo-Malthusians then and now (eg FoE, ACF, and Greenpeace).

So you're saying that Arrhenius, with his clairvoyant vision, was able to foresee that his work on the greenhouse effect will be used by ALGORE!!!!! to impose EUGENICS!!!!!! on the White Man, the Jew of Liberal Fascism... and this led him to "take over" (with different words) Malthus's formulation of population and crop growth for the greenhouse warming formula.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | January 31, 2009 4:29 AM

Yes Tim, as Shakesbunny wrote, first we kill all the denialists.

Posted by: Eli Rabett | January 31, 2009 7:26 AM

I think we underestimate Timmy.

See, he just may be the next Galileo. We all know he is working - right now - on multiple manuscripts to overturn the Eugenics-Based Greenie Science.

Either that, or he is from an alternate universe and they have different physics over there. Say, Tim, what do they use for energy in your universe? Computation? Is there on-line porn?

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | January 31, 2009 11:06 AM

Frank,

Hitler knew that reducing human population was the only way to save the planet from th' globul warmin. He was the ultimate envirogreenie, which is why I have an 'SS' tatooed next to my tattoo of a druid (which are just above the tattoo of the first line of Marx's Manifesto).

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | January 31, 2009 1:30 PM

James Lovelock his-self said only last week that Nature might, erm, 'remove' up to 90% of the human population. Of course, we might quibble about the proportion, but...

...omigod, Nature is a closet Eugenicist!

Who'd 'a' thunk it?!

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 31, 2009 6:15 PM

Sod: you disappoint me, I thought I had detected a glimmer of understanding. Sans [CO2], sans food, period. Sans increasing [CO2], sans increasing food production. What are my false assumptions? I don't make any, I deal only in the statistics and basics of the carbon cycle, e.g. (1) in what form does the average annual global absorption of 57.8%, or now 6 GtC of CO2 emissions, manifest itself? (2) What will be the absorption if emissions drop to only 5 GtC or less as proposed? (3) What will the impact of that be on the answer to (1)? Do not bother to reply until you can answer these questions very precisely, by numbers not armwaving, and unless you do in detail, do not expect any further response from me.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 1, 2009 3:30 AM

so the majority of it ends in the oceans. the plants that take up most CO2 (on land) seem to be TREES. they don t contribute much to food production.

And not if they are water or nitrogen stressed. Sadly, N is often limited in hardwood forests. The scholarship is clear on this, and has been for a long time. Stating CO2 is 'plant food' is, simply, shilling for the practice of recycling long-ago refuted arguments. Anyone who does this is an ignoramus or a shill. And since we have proof of Timmy's brillllllllliance, there is only one choice here.

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | February 1, 2009 2:10 PM

" Sans [CO2], sans food, period. Sans increasing [CO2], sans increasing food production. What are my false assumptions?"

that it's in any way linear or even monotonic.

sans H2O sans food. Increase H2O until Waterworld resembles a documentary, you have not increased food. quite the contrary. (hoping this is not an excuse to miss the point of the post by erecting a strawman as though I had stated that AGW will cause all the dry land on the planet to be flooded. I don't, I'm just demonstrating ab reductio a non-monotonic driver of food production.)

Posted by: z | February 1, 2009 5:06 PM

I:

Consider the possibility that global warming was concocted by GRIGORI RASPUTIN!!!!! and became a cornerstone of the theories of ADOLF HITLER!!!!! and not forgetting THE FREEMASONS!!!!!

It's like what happens when you cross Hellboy with Hitler: The Rise of Evil and Lord of the Rings, or maybe it's Bored of the Rings. I smell a blockbuster coming.

Dano:

Hitler knew that reducing human population was the only way to save the planet from th' globul warmin. He was the ultimate envirogreenie, which is why I have an 'SS' tatooed next to my tattoo of a druid (which are just above the tattoo of the first line of Marx's Manifesto).

Bernard J.:

James Lovelock his-self said only last week that Nature might, erm, 'remove' up to 90% of the human population. Of course, we might quibble about the proportion, but...

...omigod, Nature is a closet Eugenicist!

Who'd 'a' thunk it?!

Tim Curtin replies:

I am just back from the fantastic Darwin exhibition at the National Museum, with its many references to the major role of Malthus in inspiring both Darwin and Wallace.

Oh noes, CHARLES DARWIN!!!!! was also part of the Vast Warmist Conspiracy!

The Secular Jihad 2019, coming to an alternate universe near you.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | February 2, 2009 5:29 AM

Tim Curtin,

Read this part of the abstract: "Yield is a complex phenotypic trait determined by the interactions of a genotype with the environment". And what does the environment mean? Both biotic and abiotic factors. These are not addressed here, because, to be fair to the authors, they work in a plant breeding department and have little experience with field ecology. Its also fine and well setting up lab experiments under tightly controlled conditions but these have to be translated to complex biological systems that are under a wide array of dynamic stresses and constraints. Given that the authors of this article work nearby to where I am based, I will directly ask them what kind of conclusions they wish to derive from the global experiment that our species is conducting.

What annoys me about posts from Tim C are the selectivity: there are many published articles that paint a very different set of conclusions from the few that articles that Tim cites, yet those he cites are presumably supposed to be the 'last word' on the subject. Those with very different conclusions - more ecologically based studies - are ignored because they do not fit in with the worldview that Tim appears to be promoting. But, heck Tim, why listen to me? I am only a senior scientist in population ecology who has published more than 80 articles a year in peer-reviewed journals since 1993. Why should my cautionary arguments mean anything?

Moreover, it is important to stress that the major problems with respect to food production are often more based on the mass inequality in wealth distribution betwen the developed and underdeveloped world. In other words, there is currently more than enough food to feed the world but there are mass inequalities in the way that it is distributed. There is nothing that I see to suggest that new technologies are being driven to 'feed the poor', but rather, because these technologies are often highly expensive, they are more aimed at increasing investor's returns. Big multinational corporations want hard cash for their products, and are thus inaffordable to most of the developing countries.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 2, 2009 7:57 AM

Tim Curtin.

This obsession that you exhibit, with respect to your fancy that global food production is intimately and primarily tied to enhancing the concentration of atmospheric CO₂, is going beyond the bizarre.

You have been given innumerable hints, references and advisings, by many people, about how and where to start in order to garner a holistic understanding of photosynthetic and trophic dynamics. And yet you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge these enormous bodies of understanding. Bodies of understanding that would very rapidly show your ideas for their deficiencies if only you were able to shed your ideology and actually learn something of them.

Tim Curtin, if you consider yourself to be a competent commentator in this arena, the time has come for you to stop making unsubstantiated blanket claims, and to actually review all of the relevant literature, to gather all of the relevant data, and to construct a coherent and supported argument using the best knowledge available to science.

You need to review the entire field of photosynthetic biochemistry, including a PhD dissertation-level summary of feedbacks, inhibitors, rate-limitations, promotors, and any other modifiers of the hundreds of recognised metabolic pathways known to occur.

You need to place this in the context of trophic interactions throughout the global biosphere, and in the context of any and all positive and negative impacts that humanity has on primary productivity.

You need to model the direct and indirect energy inputs into all photosynthetic productivity processes, whether natural or anthropogenic, and to model the outputs, under various alternative environmental scenarios.

You need to provide effective counters to the huge body of experimental evidence that contradicts your stance.

You need to provide a valid budget of productivity in repsonse to modificiation of all inputs.

For starters.

And you need to have this work reviewed by the best experts in the world, in order to determine the validity of any and all supportable conclusions, and to highlight the errors and deficencies that might be present in analyses and in interpretation.

Do it. Have it reviewed here. Have it reviewed elsewhere. Submit it for publication, and if it is rejected, submit your rejected work and your counters to any critiques here or elsewhere, so that the world can dissect the minutæ. There are many here who would gladly review the best serious analysis that you can offer, and give testably objective critiques in response.

It's time to stop with your lone-emeritus-genius-in-the-basement quackery, and to actually put up the numbers. Not a few waffly and unsubstantiated regressions that pop like ants under a magnifying glass as soon as they are scrutinised, but a serious deconstruction of the disciplines of photosynthetic and agricultural productivity.

Produce your case Tim Curtin. Substantiate your claim that the fate of humanity and its food resources rests intimately with an increase in atmospheric CO₂. Refute the best understanding of the world's experts in several relevant disciplines, and in the process pick up a possible Nobel.

If you have a basis for making the claims that you do, coming up with the collated data requested above should be a cinche, because you surely already have it.

If not, then what on earth have you been relying upon when you have made the statements that you have?

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 2, 2009 8:42 AM

Tim Curtin:

Only problem is that Lovelock, Ian Enting, and bi and Bernard J. all labour under the delusion that the Arctic has landmass where they and their partners will be the last breeding pairs on the planet. Thank god, there is no such land mass, so we will be spared any more of same.

So

1. global warming is a hoax which was already perpetrated by Thomas Malthus, Svante Arrhenius, and Charles Darwin (and possibly Grigori Rasputin and Adolf Hitler and the Freemasons) even before there was such an idea as "climate activism"...
2. ...and even if global warming is really a crisis, it'll magically affect only the "alarmists" and leave the "skeptics" safe and sound.

There's only one word to describe this: GALILEO!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: bi -- IJI | February 2, 2009 12:45 PM

You are the Tim Curtin that wrote that appalling misleading article in Quadrant? I have to say you should be ashamed - this isn't a high school debate where rhetoric can trump science and by winning the phony debate AGW will disappear - this is the future climate that our descendents will have to live with and nothing people like you say will change that except for the worse through encouraging denial of the problem and promoting delay in action to deal with it. BTW Arrhenius looks like getting the overall warming nearly right as long as warming in the pipeline from already added CO2 is included - that is just one serious misrepresentation of climate science by you, that the warming to date is all we'll get (rather than waiting for equilibrium to be reached) and if that's short of what a 19th century scientist calculated the entire body of knowledge we have on the subject is invalidated? I'm appalled and amazed that you can seriously defend and hold such opinions.

Posted by: Ken | February 2, 2009 4:01 PM

Apologies to Forrester, it was Sod not he who linked to the Leakey et al paper on maize not responding to [CO2], though he appeared to support Sod. My comments on the paper remain intact, including that its authors supported the call by the 33 et al Ainsrowrth in Plant Cell & Environment) for funding to research enhancement of CO2 uplift by food crops. As for Jeff, you really do skate close to being one of those who favour insects above people. Reverting to cotton, are you one of or aware of the greens (broadly defined) who object to GM cotton, even though GM obviates the huge usage of pesticides otherwise essential to getting a cotton harvest? Bernard J. Wow that's one huge research project, I wish you luck; what are your already extant publications on that work programme? You are too modest, tell us where we can find them.

More generally, but for bi in particular, pursuing the history of thought on AGW, I was not aware until just now (hat tips to JM and LH) of the pioneering activism of Margaret Mead, nor that the lines of descent from Malthus to Darwin to Arrhenius to Julian Huxley to Paul Ehrlich actually go unbroken down to Barry Obama's John Holdren, who with his longstanding associate George Woodwell (both attended Margaret Mead's 1975 conference which set the IPCC ball rolling) have commanding positions at AAAS (Holdren is its President) and NAS. No wonder Science and PNAS plug the same line established at the Mead Conference back in '75, which is like Jeff Harvey's, that "we as a species are trying to maintain ourselves at the expense of other species; there seems to be a conflict between preserving nature and feeding the rapidly increasing population...or do we realize we cannot feed the world at any price?". Nearly 34 years later all who have commented above are evidently of the view like Holdren back then that we cannot, so lets do some euthanasia starting at Copenhagen with India and China, it will be better for their souls. Stephen Schneider no less in his paper for Mead stated that "the food-climate crisis could be very near-term and of major significance" - but the evidence is that despite the "near-term (sic) climate crisis" food production has nearly tripled since 1975, to the chagrin of bi and his fellow Malthusians Jeff, Ian, sod, and Bernard.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 2, 2009 11:56 PM

Tim Curtin:

More generally, but for bi in particular, pursuing the history of thought on AGW, I was not aware until just now (hat tips to JM and LH) of the pioneering activism of Margaret Mead, nor that the lines of descent from Malthus to Darwin to Arrhenius to Julian Huxley to Paul Ehrlich actually go unbroken down to Barry Obama's John Holdren,

I'm starting to think that Curtin's hilarious lattice of incomprehensible conspiracies deserves a diagram of its own.

GALILEO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: bi -- IJI | February 3, 2009 6:16 AM

Holdren here exhibits the serial dishonesty that convinces me that he is indeed an implant in the White House by Ozzie bin Laden.

This is supposed to be a parody, right?

Posted by: bi -- IJI | February 3, 2009 9:51 AM

I said at #120 that "Holdren here exhibits the serial dishonesty that convinces me that he is indeed an implant in the White House by Ozzie bin Laden".

Franki bi said "This is supposed to be a parody, right?"

I say, in the light of bi's dishonest hoax posting at the Heartland site, his comment is a bit rich. Pot calling kettle black or what? truth is that bi is a humourless ideologue.

As for dear old Jeff, there is an unbridgeable divide between those who think that the interests of flies, mossies, and all other insects override those of us. In other words, Jeff is a born-again eugenicist, while I remain confident in the ability of us humans to adapt to whatever the future may hold for us.

To be specific, you said: "But what makes you think that humans can exist on a planet where many of the vital services that permit us to exist and persist have been destroyed?" Hooray (from your point of view) if we can't, problem solved from your eugenicist point of view. However, please name a single "service" that would enable us to survive as a species that no longer exists? You mention fisheries, but for many years now most marketed fish have been harvested from commercial hatcheries. But then, I would never expect you to have heard of them. It is true that natural fisheries are a commons, and have been over-exploited by the Netherlands as part of EU of whom you are a proud supporter. When I worked for the EU I did try to check their takeover of Africa's fisheries, which partly explains my shortened career there!

BTW I knew quite a few of the signatories of that Rio declaration, charlatans all!

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 4, 2009 6:39 AM

Barton J said (feb 5th): "as I originally asked a number of months ago [when and where?], how many real plant physiologists and ecologists you have consulted, and worked with, in person?". Some of my best friends have been such going back as far as 1957 at what is now the University of Zimbabwe and in the 60s at York Univeristy (UK), and down amongst others to 2 lead authors of TAR/AR4 (who are also among the most frequently cited in AR4). The latter are named in my upcoming paper.

But I would welcome your comments, based on your own experience, on the following extract from the paper: "A major reason for the evidently powerful role of rising [CO2] in explaining growth of world food production is that it tends to reduce the rate of photorespiration which accounts for a loss of as much as 30 percent of the carbohydrate formed in C3 photosynthesis (Long et al. 2006b): 321), especially in the hotter and drier climates where in the past C3 plants such as wheat and rice have been less successful, cet. par., than C4 crops like maize and sorghum. Elevated CO2 increases photosynthetic efficiency and thus yield by reducing the oxygenation reaction of Rubisco (op.cit., 322).

The conclusion that also has to be drawn, that [CO2] is a more potent fertilizer than commercial nitrogenous and phosphate fertilizers, might be considered inconvenient, especially for producers of the latter. The data on total fertilizer consumption (Table 1) show it grew by only 27.5 per cent between 1981 and 2004, possibly implying the world’s farmers were using less fertilizer than might be expected when food production grew by 62.7 per cent over that period. Conversely, [CO2] grew by only 11 per cent, so its much larger coefficient than that for fertilizer use is suggestive of just how powerful a growth agent it appears to be.

The food regression (equation 2) also suggests that rising global mean temperature does have a positive effect on agricultural production, even if its coefficient is small and statistically insignificant. Nevertheless it casts some doubt on claims by Parry et al. (2004), the Stern Review (2007: Box 3.4), and Cline (2007) that rising temperatures will always have a negative global impact on agricultural yields. But it is of course true that primary food production is not dependent just on [CO2], temperature, and fertilizer usage. Rainfall is also important, especially in explaining annual variability in yields, but “global average rainfall” is an archetypal nonsense statistic. That is why we now present regression analysis of wheat yields at various locations in Australia and the USA against both [CO2], which is basically invariant with location, and, inter alia, specific rainfall data for each location".

I'd be most appreciative if you would care to join us as co-author having provided comprehensive time series data on your own yields relative to your main inputs including fertilizer and your local rainfall data?

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 9, 2009 12:36 AM

Bernard J: Here's another for you to mull over. Taub et al.(2008, Global Change Biology, 14, 565-575) claim that the "effects of elevated CO2 on the protein concentration of food crops" are likely to be negative. So here we have a duly peer-reviewed paper full of bias and b/s. At no point do the authors say what the correct or normalised concentration of protein should be. They merely assert that the concentration of protein declines with increasing elevated [CO2]. What an astounding discovery! Adding CO2 increases, inevitably, cet. par., the proportion of carbohydrate relative to protein, measured by these authors as Nitrogen. What twits. Of course if they added N in proportion to CO2 there would be no change in the relative proportions of carbohydrate and protein. Such is the "science" of GCB. The problem with these authors like those of ALL papers in Science etc is that they know nothing outside their chosen fields. Even economists have for hundreds of years have known (before Stern and Garnaut, that is), if you add more of one input holding all others constant, you encounter diminishing marginal returns. This is a concept no longer taught at any Australian university's economics department, any more than the concept that if you add inputs in proportion with each other you generally get constant returns to scale. Be that as it may, the claims of Taub et al. crucially depend on withholding information on what is the normal proportion of increases in yield of total output of a crop that should be protein (or nitrogen). For example, if enhanced [CO2] raises yields by say 15% from 10 to 11.5 t/ha t/ha, but the protein content thereof falls from 30% by 12% as claimed by Taub et al., then we actually get INCREASED protein:

Yield, t/ha 10 11.5 Protein factor 0.3 0.264 Protein 3 3.036

I wonder why Taub et al failed to mention actual protein contents anywhere in their paper? Am I wrong to conclude that like nearly all in this field, anything so long as it Madoffs with OUR money (as taxpayers) is kosher?

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 10, 2009 7:30 AM

Over eight times more fish species displayed increased distribution ranges in the North Sea (mainly small-sized species of southerly origin) compared with those whose range decreased (primarily large and northerly species).

Ummm...Seahorse and chips anyone?

Posted by: Hugh | February 16, 2009 3:27 AM

Guthrie, you don't have to as intelligent farmers keep other inputs (eg N) in balance. BTW, it's known that the Japanese insist on a minimum protein content in soy of 35%, and that has been managed in the US since for ever despite rising [CO2]. More generally, here is my letter today to Chris Field at Stanford. Are you available to co-sign?

"Dear Dr Field

You were widely reported yesterday and today by Reuters and AFP as claiming that “The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India…The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously, the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious [than any of the IPCC’s climate predictions] We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," you apparently said (the full text is appended below).

If correctly reported you are guilty of severe economy with the truth. Whilst right that emissions grew rapidly from 2000 until 2007, you have been seriously misleading by failing to mention first, that anthropogenic global warming is dependent first and foremost on the atmospheric concentration of CO2 [CO2], and not on the level of emissions per se, as despite 3 percent growth of emissions from January 2008 to January 2009, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide grew by less than 0.4 percent, that being the average rate of growth of [CO2] since 1958, which means that despite the inferences you wished the world to draw, there has been NO sustained increase in the rate of growth of [CO2] since 1958 despite ongoing growth in emissions of as much as 3% p.a.*.

Secondly, you wilfully failed to mention that absorption of those emissions by the oceanic and terrestrial biospheres grew about as fast as the emissions. Ironically, your own co-authors in some of your most recent papers (Canadell, Raupach) have assembled data that show how absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide doubled from an annual average of 2.45 billion tonnes of carbon a year from 1958 to 1963, to over 5 GtC from 2003 to 2007.**

As a result, from 1958 to 2007 over 56 percent of total emissions over that period of 331 billion tonnes was absorbed by our biospheres, in the form of the carbohydrates that are the basic feedstock for humanity, as embodied in fish, cereals, livestock, fruit, coffee, grapes, and other tree crops (eg palm oil). Without CO2 there would be no food, and reducing its present atmospheric level has been frequently proven to result in lower yields of all that feedstock (that being the corollary of the well-attested, in thousands of papers, fertilization effect of enhanced [CO2]). Your exaggeration (by over 700 percent) of the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide relative to the growth of emissions, combined with your wilful disregard of the positive side of the annual global carbon budget through your focus only on emissions, amounts to gross academic and scientific misconduct since your own work in the IPCC AR4 WG1 gives the lie to your present claims. I and some of my colleagues intend to make appropriate representations to the authorities of the University of Stanford, Reuters, AFP, and the IPCC unless we see an immediate retraction of your misleading claims reported by Reuters/AFP.

· www.esrl.noaa.gov.gmd/ccgg/trends/

· www.globalcarbonproject.org/

Kind regards"

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 16, 2009 7:02 AM

Jeff: thanks for your comments. I will do my best to respond.

You said (1): "I'd gladly debate you on such issues as the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and on such relevant issues as the ability of species in complex adaptive systems to respond to the numerous human assaults across the biosphere." So will I. (2) "These areas are vital if we are to elucidate with any accuracy the future consequences of our actions, because nature generates a range of conditions and services that permit humans to exist and persist". We have also adapted inw ays that improve our living conditions, heating for the Dutch, air.con out here to name just 2. (3) "...I would like to know what in the way of course you have studied on population and systems ecology." Well I am an economist whose earliest papers included one on economics of population growth (Review of Social Economy, Sept. 1969, endorsed in the next issue by none other than the great Colin Clark who alas died before he could be awarded the Economics Nobel which undoubtedly he would have received had it existed in the 60s). But I have probably read as much ecology as you have economics. (4) "I get nowhere with you because the way I see it you argue that processes emerging from these systems are linear..." I don't - there is plenty of non-linear economics and econometrics by the way. (5) "Certainly I believe that there are very few statured scientists who would argue that carbon is a limiting nutrient in nature and that the planet and its systems will benefit into perpetuity from an unlimited transfer of carbon to the atmosphere from plant biomass and belowground where it is stored." Try Dyson, Long et al passim. There are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who have documented the positive effects of enhanced [CO2] on yields of C3 cereals especially, and not only in labs or greenhouses, there are hundreds of FACE studies. The corollary has to be that reduced [CO2] by up to 80% as will be proposed - but hopefully not enacted - at Copenhagen will reduce yields not only below what they would be under BAU but below the present level. Read my letter to Field above: the c170 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon absorbed by the biospheres since 1958 supported the expansion of crop outputs etc since then to well above the equilibrium level that obtained before 1750, not to mention the feeding of the actual increasing numbers all your non-human species including fish (when you allow for commercial hatcheries etc). At present c 6GtC out of current emissions of c10 GtC are absorbed by our biospheres, Copenhagen will seek to reduce emissions to 2 GtC or less. What then for the 6 GtC, which is the NET increase in absorption every year at present? (6) Then you said: "The fact that humans are consuming natural capital faster than it is being replaced is also of profound concern." There is no such thing, and even if there is, it will not run out any time soon. (7) "Climate change is challenging species and populations already stressed by humans in a myriad of other ways" What climate change? The GISS 0.7oC since 1900 is nothing, in fact nil, when you allow for the facts first that the cool 1880-1900 baseline perforce excludes the whole of the hot African tropics, while the hot 90s and 2000s exclude equally perforce most of the most northerly cold weather stations, especially in Siberia. (8) Finally, you said "the fact that 16% of the world's population in the 'rich world' consumes more than 80% of the world's resources (sic) is evidence of a massive discrepanacy that has been maintained by the neoliberal economic agenda (which is neither new nor liberal) that dominates societies across the planet". That is a bogus statistic as most of the rich world's large but rapidly falling share of world income consumes hardly any resources (eg banks and other finance, universities etc etc). Much if not most manufacturing is now in China India etc.

I don't comment on your species data, as that is not my field, but do remember Darwin, extinctions have been endemic since the beginning of time, as he documents so vividly, and those that have survived and will in the future will be those that evolve and adapt, except for our species that will opt for suicide via mass starvation if Copenhagen does what you hope for.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 17, 2009 1:19 AM

Tim Curtin.

You carry on ad nauseum about the crude increase in photosynthetic production with increased CO₂ when all other parameters are non-limiting. One isolated and non-contextualised phenomenon. However, beyond this, you have not reflected upon, employed, referred to, nor otherwise referenced or shown understanding of, any other physiological or ecological process, unless one includes your spurious mention of Darwin's reference to extinction.

With this fact in mind, just how are you qualified to counter and to rebuff the understanding of experts in biology? How do you propose to establish the informed and nuanced arguments that would be necessary to contradict the many biological facts that Jeff, I and others have repeated rubbed your nose in?

And please, in a paragraph or less, explain at what rate atmospheric CO₂ concentration would decrease if all human emissions were to cease immediately. You can include mention of your putative sinks if you desire, but I am most interested in your projected trajectory of decrease.

I hope that this will include reference to the best literature...

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 17, 2009 5:25 AM

Tim, You are doing what other contrarians do, and I have to deal with this all of the time. Your tactic is simple: without 100% unequivocal evidence, the problem does not exist. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about it.

I am afraid that this strategy is old, tired and useless. Every indicator shows that the health and vitality of the natural world is in decline. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment spelled it out clearly enough 2 years ago. Natural systems continue to shrink. Soil fertility is declining. Water quality is declining. The UN-World Bank Living Planet Index shows that the three most important ecosystems on Earth that help to sustain humanity - coastal 'green seas', forest and freshwater - have declined in quality and extent by about 35% since the index was started in 1970. As the human enterprise grows, we are consuming more and more of nature. What is worse is that most of this growth has been amongst developed countries which finance huge ecological deficits to maintain the status quo. There isn't a single country in the developed world with the possible exception of Canada that could sustain itself on the resources contained within its own political boundries, at least based on the curret per capita ecological footprint in each. This explains why Amin was correct, and why western foreign policy is based more on resource lotting and expansionism and less on alleviating hunger and poverty. Tom Athanasiou nails it in his book, "Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor" as does Patrick Bond in his book, "Looting Africa".

Furthermore, as I said above, 10-40% of well-known species (vertebrates, vascular plants) are threatened with extinction. Declines amongst bird populations worldwide are pandemic. Tne number of mammals that become listed by CITES every year increases. We don't have much information on invertebrates because most groups are unstudied, but there is no reason to believe that as their habitat shrinks, they won't lose out too.

As for your comment re: flowers and bees, your arguments on this appear to me to be utterly elementary and simplistic. Vascular plants need a lot more than just C0 2 to thrive. They need both biotic and abiotic conditions to be optimal, and, just as important is the fact that they need habitat. This is being constantly eroded as the human enterprise expands.

I hate to say it, but your arguments are utterly simplisitc and elemenatry. to me I cannot debate at this level of discourse, I am afraid. Who cares what Samir Amin's political affiliations are? He is a leading economist and I would expect you to argue facts and not have to resort to refrains like he is a "great Marxist". This is appalling. I might just as well think that you are a :"great right wing libertartian". Does this make you correct and Amin wrong?

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 17, 2009 8:29 AM

Sod: Thanks, but your graphic is full of errors. First, fossil fuel emissions are currently well over 8 GtC, not 5.5, and so on. Do check AR4, WG1, table 7.1, produced by Canadell, Field, Raupach etc etc, and their refinements in Canadell et al PNAS 2007 and Raupach et al Global carbon project. I agree with your (1) that the level of CO2 concentration has an impact on "uptake" by oceans - and land, but do we want less, leading to less plankton crops and trees? What are your sources for your (2). I have about 2,000 for the contrary. Re your (3), "little CO2 in the air" will have no impact on food production? Sources please. I gave a few of mine above.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 17, 2009 8:53 PM

Tim Curtin.

Your hysterical (in any interpretation) notion of catastrophic CO₂ loss from the atmosphere is quite spectacularly contradicted by Solomon et al, who have rather more expertise in these analyses than do you. Have a look at the first figure, and then explain to us why they are wrong.

Of course, if they are incorrect, you have yet another letter of complaint to sent to PNAS. Which reminds me - have you heard back from PNAS regarding your previous discovery of errors?

If you seriously believe your ideas about photosynthetic productivity in relation to CO₂ increase, and the critical dependence of productivity upon sustained human emissions, write a paper and submit it to a reputable journal. And if you are serious about the grave risk of CO₂ loss from the atmosphere should humans curb their emissions, once again the world should hear of it through your submission to a reputable journal.

If you are correct, these ideas need to be tested, confirmed, and rushed out for all to hear. Oh, and please be sure to include us in any and all correspondence that you share with the journals to which you submit.

I note that you have provided not one iota of ecological understanding to contradict Jeff Harvey, myself, or others. given Jeff's detailed, lengthy, and comprehensive list of ecological risks posed by CO₂ increase and by anthropogenic global warming, you are overdue to present a proper and an effective counter to these manifold points that have been left wanting for a response by you.

Prove yourself in all of these fields, or (more sensibly) face the fact that you are actually speaking from your rectum.

I would not be surprised to find that it was someone just like you who was the holotypic individual upon whom Messrs Dunning and Kruger formed the description of their eponymous effect.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 18, 2009 12:43 AM

Bernard,

Many thanks for the outstanding article in PNAS - one of the most rigid journals - that is devastating to TimC's thesis. The debate is closed as far as I am concerned. I will vouch any day for a peer-reviewed scientific arctile in one of the world's top journals by a leading climate scientist over the protestations of an economist. Note that all Tim had to say was that the article was 'preposterous' and that the lead author was 'stoopid'.

As I said, debate over. Game, set and match. Bernard, well done!

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 18, 2009 4:34 AM

Oh, and for those who have not yet followed the link to the Solomon paper, do spare a moment to compare their trajectories in figure 1 with those Tim Curtin describes above, and graphs in his 'papers' on his web page (exempli gratia slide 28 of the 'emeritus' effort).

Keep in mind too that Curtin seems to ignore the fact that the biosphere ticked over productively for hundreds of millions of year without the input of human emissions. And consider also that if there was any signifcant reduction in productivity in pre-industrial photosynthetic milieux, some clever scientist would have detected this inhibited productivity in the records of dendrochronological cores or in cross-sections of petrified wood.

When I look at the heartwood of the slabs of petrified wood that I polished during my lapidary days, I see rather robust rates of diameter increase. Whatever can that mean?

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 18, 2009 6:49 AM

TimC,

First of all, let's get to Susuan Solomon's qualifications: she has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and her work has been cited in the peer-reviewed literature more than 11,000 times. This is an astonshing figure of citations - her 'h' rating is 58 - which means her 58th most cited article has 58 citations. Her qualifications are immense - she is one of the world's leading scientists. Period.

Given your childish rants above, how do you expect intellectual discourse to proceed? Susan is correct: hugely deterministic systems exhibit profoundly long lag times. There is little doubt that if we were to cease emitting C0 2 today that atmospheric levels would continue to rise fro perhasp another 20 to 30 years before stabilizing. But this is not the point. What you are saying is, given this knowledge, why stop now? Let's keep pumping more and more of it into the atmosphere, under this deluded notion that it will soimehow create a green utopia that will feed the world. This is nonsense, totally and utterly. Nature will not repsond linearly to increased atmospheric C02. There will be non-linear responses, leading to mthe potential unraveling of food webs and other potentially serious consequences. Humans are conducting an experiment in the dark.

Moreover, of course non-human species will outlive Homo sapiens, no serious scientist would ever dispute that. Life will continue to evolve long after we have dsiappeared. Every species has a shelf life so to speak - many insects exist as species for a few million years, perhaps less for mammals. But there is no reason to believe that our time for extinction will not come. The problem is that at present our species appears intent on bringing that time closer and closer to the present. We are destroying many of the planet's life-supporting ecosystems, undermining the ability of these systems to sustain themselves and eventually us. As I have said and I will reiterate, we exist because natural systems generate conditions which permit it. They do not exist by virtue of supporting Homo sapiens; instead, Homo sapiens exists because natural systems generate both abiotic and biotic conditions which enable us to exist and persist. But now we are simplifying these systems with increasing efficiency, and this cannot continue indefinintely. We are entering a 'period of consequences'. Climate change is one of many anthropogenic stresses on systems of immense complexity whose functioning we barely understand but which sustain us. Tim, you appear to be saying its just fine and dandy to keep experimenting on systems, using what I can only interpret as linear extrapolations to support your case (and, frankly a suite of other flimsy arguments). If you were to attend scientific workshops where the biodiversity/ecosystem functioning science was being discussed, debated and argued you would have a very different perspective, I honestly believe that.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 18, 2009 7:18 AM

TC makes an excellent point:

those infallible experts Solomon, Plattner, Knutti, and Friedlingstein

Not bad from a fallible inexpert ... getting something largely correct!

Like the vast majority of commenters here, including me, TC is an inexpert in most things he opines about here (outside his own field). Thing is, he's more adept than most commenters here at this inexpertness lark.

Guys, stop feeding him ... please (great though your contributions are). TC is nought but trolling. He's banned from all other threads here (IIRC) and his recent comments here have nothing at all to do with the title of the thread (long since gone off topic).

And for semi-interested bystanders still following this, TC is prone to selective quotation (which is why I started this reply with an illustrative selective quotation), as well as gross misrepresentation and/or misunderstanding. His comments about "Fig. 1" are illustrative of this propensity for selective quotation, as the accompanying text at the Fig. 1 citation makes clear.

Fig. 1 illustrates how the concentrations of carbon dioxide would be expected to fall off through the coming millennium if manmade emissions were to cease immediately following an illustrative future rate of emission increase of 2% per year [comparable to observations over the past decade (ref. 13)] up to peak concentrations of 450, 550, 650, 750, 850, or 1,200 ppmv; similar results were obtained across a range of EMICs that were assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (5, 7). This is not intended to be a realistic scenario but rather to represent a test case whose purpose is to probe physical climate system changes. A more gradual reduction of carbon dioxide emission (as is more likely), or a faster or slower adopted rate of emissions in the growth period, would lead to long-term behavior qualitatively similar to that illustrated in Fig. 1 (see also Fig. S1). The example of a sudden cessation of emissions provides an upper bound to how much reversibility is possible, if, for example, unexpectedly damaging climate changes were to be observed.

TC --> [killfile]

Posted by: P. Lewis | February 18, 2009 7:53 AM

I notice that none of Lewis, Bernard and Jeff responds to the specific crits I made of Susie Sollie et al. Lewis, your additional quote from the caption to their fig.1 confirms the gross exaggeration of their very strident title. It states their paper shows "irreversible" climate change for the next 1000 years even if we do eliminate all CO2 emissions, including I suppose those when you exhale, which would probably have other positive benefits if we could get rid of them even at the cost of losing lovable you. The scientific and MORAL issue here is, can it be valid to exclude all known global sinks in order to exaggerate the impact of emissions on climate?. Sol et pals assume zero terrestrial net sinks throughout. Is that good science? I would welcome textual point by point refutations of my comments, not armwaving and hysteria.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 18, 2009 8:20 AM

C'mon Tim, you ought to know better than that. As far as I can see, Solomon et al. don't necessarily exclude terrestrial sinks at all here. However, they are correctly assuming that such a massive determinisitic system as global climate control takes a lot to shift it out of moderate equilibrium; climate forcings normally play themselves out over a much greater time frame than we are currently seeing. And, as we humans continue to slash and burn our way across the biosphere, the capacity of sinks to absorb CO2 will decrease. Again, humans have been procrastinating on the environment for a long time. But that does not mean that we should continue to procrastrinate.

The fact is that you don't appear to have any facts. You are arguing much like I would expect a contrarian to argue - as I said yesterday your refrain appears to be that "Without 100% unequivocal proof there isn't a problem, and that we should therefore continue with a business-as-usual policy". You've even gone farther - on the basis of a few extrapolative studies and lab studies you've somehow concluded that increasing atmospheric levels of C02 has incredible benefits in terms of alleviating hunger. I've dismissed this nonsense before. I dont' intend to again.

As for the Solomon paper, it is excellent science, and deserves to be in a journal like PNAS. If you are so knowledgeable in fields in which I presume you have no academic training (climate science and ecophysiology - am I correct?), then why should we believe you? Why aren't you writing and publishing articles in the pages of Nature, Science, PNAS or other good journals like Global Change Biology if you have some unforseen wisdom that eludes most of the rest of us?

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 18, 2009 8:37 AM

TC is merely converting CO2 --> beans --> CH4 + SOx

Posted by: Eli Rabett | February 18, 2009 8:54 AM

Tim "solids" Curtin?

Posted by: pough | February 18, 2009 3:26 PM

Tim Curtin.

May we see a draft of your letter to PNAS and Solomon et al, please?

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 18, 2009 11:43 PM

Tim, so why haven't I seen your 'due diligence' in the pages of Nature, Science or PNAS? Why do you rely on the blogosphere? If your analyses are so rigid, why don't you submit them to rigorous peer-review?

Your strategy is hit-and-run. But that doesn't cut ice in academia. As I have said a zillion times, your extrapolations are basically linear. You ignore non-linear effects on natural systems and on the services that emerge from them. In fact, your entire arguments, as I see them, appear to expunge the effects of any kind of global change on nature. Instead you dismiss this, or generate optimistic projections. The reason your work would not withstand peer-review is because you, like those at the corporate-funded think tanks like the Fraser Institute, don't have any expertise in environmental science. I am afraid that most of the think tanks don't give a s*&@ about the science, in my view. Their aim, as I see it, is to distort and mangle science to promote a corporate agenda. I would find a debate on population ecology and environmental science with a right wing economist like McKitrick quite a humorous experience, much like it was when I 'debated' Bjorn Lomborg back in 2002. Many of them can't tell a mole cricket from a giraffe. And yet we are supposed to believe that they have 'done the math' and have a complete working knowledge of the best ways to manage the biosphere.

Gimme a break, man.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 19, 2009 4:13 AM

Tim, I am an empiricist. By non-linear I am explicilty referring to the countless numbers of examples where the change in one parameter of a system (e.g. the elimination of a keystone species) cascades through the system and has all kinds of effects that were almost impossible to predict beforehand. One of the best examples that is close to your neck of the woods concerns the invasive prickly pear cactus. It was introduced into Australia and within a few decades wreaked havoc on agricultural systems, which it began to dominate Land that was important for grazing cattle). The economic cost of this plant on rangelands probably ran into hundreds of millions of dollars per year or more. The introduction of an insect that specializes on the cactus in its native range - Cactoblastis cactorium - brought the prickly pear under control in only a few years. Today, both species are rare in Australia, and one might assume that Cactoblastis is an innocuous and unimportant insect species on this basis. But were it to disappear, the cactus would be released from its most important natural enemy and it would likely expand explosively again to pest proportions within only a few years.

This is an example of non-linear dynamics, whereby the change of one small parameter (in this case, the introduction of an exotic plant without its most important herbivore) can have all kinds of profoundly unpredictable non-linear effects on recipient ecosystems. There are thousands of similar examples in the empirical literature. Classical biological control hinges on it, but there are also many examples from natural systems where a seemingly unconnected number of specioes interact through a common demoninator. DEonald Strong and Garly Polis described ecology quite rightly as the most complex of the sciences because of the profoundly non-linear relationship between cause and effect. The effects of enhanced C02 regimes and climate change are having similar non-linear effects on phenological relationships amongst species across different trophic levels of interacting food webs. Species do not exist in isolation - they interact with other species - and as humans continue to simpify complex adaptive systems at the rate that we are there are going to be all kinds of hidden and nasty surprises in store.

The problem is that most of those preaching the status quo are not Earth scientists and do not read the relevant journals and thus dismiss what they do not understand. Nature is immensely complex, that is for sure, but it is clear that systems do respond to change in quite dramatic and unpredictable ways. Considering the scope of the global non-replicatable experiment that humanity is conducting on these systems, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief that these systems are inherently quite vigorous and have withstood the assault thus far (at least, many key ecosystem services have not been lost to the point that the costs to our economies have been catastrophic). But there is no guarantee that the experiment can continue indefinitely without much more serious consequences. Just because one does not understand the precise mechanims that regulate the functions of natural systems does not mean that it is prudent to continue along the current path, given what we do know.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 19, 2009 6:37 AM

Tim, They are going to eat you alive. be prepared. You mail is full of inaccuracies:

1. "Secondly, Dr Field wilfully failed to mention that absorption of those emissions by the oceanic and terrestrial biospheres grew about as fast as the emissions".

There are all kinds of models (e.g. work by Nepatad and colleagues) that show a limit to how much of the extra C02 the biosphere can absorb. It cannot go indefintely - especially since humans are simplifying anture at an astounding rate. Again, you make linear extrapolations and refuse to acknowledge thresholds. The planet is not an indefinite sponge.

1. "As a result, from 1958 to 2007 over 56 percent of total emissions over that period of 331 billion tonnes was absorbed by our global biospheres, in the form of the carbohydrates that are the basic feedstock for humanity, as embodied in fish, cereals, soy, and all other food crops, livestock, fruit, grapes, and other tree crops (eg palm oil). Without CO2 there would be no food, and reducing its present atmospheric level has been frequently proven to result in lower yields of all that feedstock (that being the corollary of the well-attested, in thousands of papers, fertilization effect of enhanced [CO2]). Field’s exaggeration (by over 700 percent) of the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide relative to the growth of emissions, combined with his wilful disregard of the positive side of the annual global carbon budget through his focus only on emissions, amounts to gross academic and scientific misconduct".

This statment is an abomination. If I showed this to my colleagues here I am sure that they would either cringe or break out in laughter. Thousands of papers? Who are you kidding? Where are the data linking fish yields with enhanced C02? Given that most of the world's major natural fisheries are on the brink of collapse, and their food webs seriously undermined, I can only wonder where the hell you dredged this nonsense up. And of course, the reader should note that you haven't made a single mention here linking climate change and C02 with their effects on natural systems. You just don't get it. If I were an editor at PNAS I would send this where it belongs.

Basically, as Eli said yesterday you are drawing conclusions on the basis of linear extrapolations. Thus, increased C02 means more primary production = a wonderful happy world. This is pure tripe. How many bloody times do you have to be told: nature does not work this way. In my opinion, your comments are elementary and go well beyond conclusions that any competent scientist would make on the basis of primarily laboratory based or extrapolative studies.

Your remarks, "The conclusion to be drawn from the above is that the NAS is merely a branch of the Democratic Party, and employs as peer reviewers only those who are past or future co-authors of those whose paper under review" or "the NAS is nothing but a front for fellow travelling Marxist environmentalists for whom the truth counts for zero" are beyond the pale.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 19, 2009 8:29 AM

Jeff: I am amazed by your instant but fatuous response. What is your take on the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE OF THE USA which over a period of just 5 years published the following statementts of the Airborne Fraction of CO2 emissions?

1. Hansen & Sato, PNAS, 2004: 60%

2. Solomon et al, IPCC 2007: 58%

3. Canadell et al., PNAS, 2007: 43%

$. Solomon et al., PNAS, 2009: 20%.

The PNAS's idiot peer reviewers show they know nothing and care less. What if Einstein had revised his e=MC^2 to e=MC^3 a year later, to e=MC^4 a year after that? But you and your half-witted mates here think that going from 60 to 20% over 5 years is evidence of settled science for such a hugely critical variable policy-wise? Back to school mate.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 19, 2009 9:06 AM

Yes, more of the Curtin reaction, as it shall evermore be known CO2 --> beans --> CH4 + SOx

The jerk, after ranting about rates, has the gall to compare estimates of how much CO2 remains in the atmosphere over different time periods and claim that they disagree.

Posted by: Eli Rabett | February 19, 2009 9:38 AM

The PNAS's idiot peer reviewers show they know nothing and care less. What if Einstein had revised his e=MC^2 to e=MC^3 a year later, to e=MC^4 a year after that? But you and your half-witted mates here think that going from 60 to 20% over 5 years is evidence of settled science for such a hugely critical variable policy-wise? Back to school mate.

the Solomon09pnas paper actually says:

together with well-established ocean chemistry and physics that require 20% of the emitted carbon to remainin the atmosphere on thousand-year timescales [quasiequilibrium airborne fraction (AFequi), determined largely by the Revelle factor governing the long-term partitioning of carbon between the ocean and atmosphere/biosphere system]

Curtin forgot to mention the 1000 years aspect...

Posted by: sod | February 19, 2009 9:51 AM

Tim Curtin.

What we have is a non-linear recursive system in which growing populations of virtually all plant and animal species subsist on growing food supply fed by growing [CO2]; all those species respire and eventually expire, but are replaced by ever-growing numbers of descendants, in aggregate.

You still haven't grasped either Darwinism or 'Malthusianism' yet, have you? Can you not see where your claim falls down?

Reducing [CO2] will inexorably reduce food supply and with a lag the dependent populations of all species. A new equilibrium may emerge at 280 ppm with 1750 levels of populations of all species.

Interesting. Please detail the nature of the trophic differentials implied by your statement. I am curious, too, to know just how the pre/post industrial productivities (according to your model) impact upon the populations/biomass of 'all species'. Seriously, do you have any real appreciation of the actual validities of your throw-away 'theories'?

Your reference to John Mashey's post is completely irrelevant to the points that we have been trying to impress upon you on this thread. (Although for what it's worth, I have a niggling feeling that the chemistry/energy budgets of these carbonation reactions isn't as miraculous as John's source makes out - especially once deacidification is accounted for somewhere along the way - but that's coming from my own experience with the energy budget involved in decarbonation in the lime cycle).

So.

You have demonstrated no understanding of the incredible complexities of ecological processes. You have shown no understanding of the complexities of photosynthesis, nor why an extrapolation, to the biospheric level, of one aspect of productivity is fraught with complication. You have provided no substantive rebuttal of the two papers above that you have criticised based on your prejudice, and you certainly have provided no evidence to back up your libellous accusations of incompetence and of scientific malfeasance that you have directed at respected scientists, organisations and journals.

Tim Curtin, where exactly is your scientific case? Your juggling of a few numbers using the rubberiness of some dubious economic notions just doesn't cut the mustard.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 19, 2009 11:41 AM

Jeff @ #167: Thanks for those links, we seem to be progressing! But your comments do not cover the case of declining atmospheric CO2. What then?

Your second link Nepstad et al is more problematic. They assume that a deforested Amazon becomes scorched earth. What are the actual annual and recurrent absorptions of CO2 by whatever replaces the forest vis a vis the annual absorptions by the forest? They imply biofuels materialise from, well, what? Again, one needs to distinguish between stocks and flows, as they never do. Their Fig.1 is so stylized as to be worthless unless and until they quantify the flows, the casual empiricism in their text is not good enough. They and you appear not be aware of the paper Effects of rising temperatures and [CO2] on the physiology of tropical forest trees even though it is in the very same issue of the same journal as Nepstad et al, I wonder why? (Jon Lloyd, and Graham D. Farquhar Phil.Trans. R. Soc. B doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.0032). Nothing to do with their Abstract?

“Using a mixture of observations and climate model outputs and a simple parametrization of leaf-level photosynthesis incorporating known temperature sensitivities, we find no evidence for tropical forests currently existing ‘dangerously close’ to their optimum temperature range. Our model suggests that although reductions in photosynthetic rate at leaf temperatures (TL) above 308C may occur, these are almost entirely accountable for in terms of reductions in stomatal conductance in response to higher leaf to-air vapour pressure deficitsD.This is as opposed to direct effects ofTL on photosynthetic metabolism. We also find that increases in photosynthetic rates associated with increases in ambient [CO2] over forthcoming decades should more than offset any decline in photosynthetic productivity due to higher D or TL or increased autotrophic respiration rates as a consequence of higher tissue temperatures.We also find little direct evidence that tropical forests should not be able to respond to increases in [CO2] and argue that the magnitude and pattern of increases in forest dynamics across Amazonia observed over the last few decades are consistent with a [CO2]-induced stimulation of tree growth.”. This paper confirms the position I have taken here. Do you contest it?

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 20, 2009 2:11 AM

Oh d'errr, I see now...it's a URN. And there was me thinking I knew everything!!

Posted by: Hugh | February 20, 2009 7:17 AM

Tim, please do not put words in my mouth. I know exactly what an algorithm and a logarithm are, but what has this got to do with unravelling ecological complexity descripively?

As I said before, I am an empiricist. What is clear to me is that you have not attempted to answer a single point I have raised regarding the non-linear dynamics of ecological communities and ecosystems, and how they relate to your discredited hypothesis of linear and positive plant responses. I can see your face as I post some of the scientific findings re: soil microbial ecology and above-ground trophic interactions. Blank. Vacant. Nothing to say because you don't understand it. So, like other contrarians who do not understand basic ecology, you send it down your memory hole. How else can I interpret you resounding silence on these points? To be honest, given that I was trained in this discipline, I didn't exactly expect much better from you, but in the end your silence (aside from barbs and witty remark) speaks volumes. You cannot debate ecology because it seems to me that you do not read much about it - with the exception of a few ecophysiological studies that purport to show positive plant responses to elevated atmopsheric C02 levels but which have generally excludued most or all interactions with other biota. This means that the results are conjectural, perhaps even artifacts, unless they can be applied in a broader ecological framework.

I do not have time to debate with someone who it seems to me does not understand basic ecology. Be honest - have you ever read an elemenatary ecology textbook Tim? And if not, why should I waste my breath? I have research to do. I am busy involved in research exploring the potential of co-evolved antagonistic plant-insect mutualisms. I am also exploring context-and trait-dependent parameters in multitrophic interactions, and how patch size and structural heterogeneity affects top-down versus bottom-up regulatory processes. I dont' expect you to understand this, either. But please do not waste my time on pedantic arguments if you do not understand more complex ecological processes.

Moreover, methinks you throw around terms like "Marxists" and "idiots" too freely in describing scientists and others who tend to disagree with your pithy arguments. Some advice: look in the mirror.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 20, 2009 10:14 AM

Jeff: for starters, try the following -

Science 21 November 1997: Vol. 278. no. 5342, p. 1411 DOI: 10.1126/science.278.5342.1411 Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Perspectives CLIMATE CHANGE: Carbon Dioxide and Vegetation Graham D. Farquhar What happens to vegetation when greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) increase in concentration and the temperature goes up? The Framework Convention on Climate Change commits the signatories to avoiding dangerous interference with the climate system, interference that might harm the world's agriculture and natural ecosystems. But just what are the likely responses of vegetation? Much attention is paid to the effects of temperature and other climatic changes. As Street-Perrott et al. report on page 1422 of this issue, there is now evidence that, at an ecosystem level, the direct effects of an increase in carbon dioxide are themselves important (1).

Street-Perrott and her colleagues have studied the paleoenvironmental history of high-altitude lakes and the surrounding vegetation in East Africa. They examined the lake sediments, the pollen and leaf waxes in them, and the carbon isotope composition of bulk organic matter and of specific biomarkers. They conclude that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the last glacial period has allowed trees to grow where the vegetation was (before 13,000 years ago) restricted to an almost treeless, grassy heathland.

Street-Perrott et al. found that the increase in CO2 concentration was correlated with a decrease in the amount, measured as d13C, of the heavier stable isotope. This result is consistent with a shift from the photosynthetic pathway common in tropical grasses (denoted C4) to the pathway found in trees (denoted C3). However, a number of factors can influence the composition of sediments, and hence, the importance of the authors' careful work in measuring composition of particular biomarkers to separate terrestrial, aquatic, and bacterial sources. C4 plants utilize a CO2-concentrating mechanism that is advantageous at low concentrations but is more "costly" to the plant than C3 metabolism as CO2 levels increase. The very evolution of C4 was probably in response to low CO2 concentrations, with rapid expansion about 7 million years ago (2).

The findings offer an explanation for a paleoecological puzzle. Previous estimates of the cooling of tropical land areas at the last glacial maximum (LGM) (about 20,000 years ago) were large, so large as to be incompatible with the decrease in sea-surface temperatures (<2oC) deduced from deep-sea cores. The terrestrial estimates had been made by examining changes in the elevation of tree lines and ascribing those changes to temperature alone. Acknowledging that CO2 concentration itself affects the growth of trees enables us to see that the cooling of tropical land was not so great. During the glacial times, the trees were being starved of the substrate for photosynthesis. Along these same lines, Sage has argued (3) that agriculture became viable at several places around the world between 11,000 and 6000 years ago, only when the CO2 concentration became sufficiently large to sustain decent yields for our first farmers.

For the individual plant, water-use efficiency is almost directly proportional to the level of CO2 for a given regime of temperature and humidity (4). So concentrations of 180 parts per million (ppm) (such as occurred during the LGM), being half the current levels, would mean that plants had to transpire twice as much water then as now to achieve the same level of photosynthesis (see figure). Put another way, doubling the CO2 concentration is almost like doubling the rainfall as far as plant water availability is concerned. Further, increased greenhouse forcing also speeds up the global hydrological cycle, and so, on average, the actual rainfall increases with increasing CO2 concentration. Many of the paleorecords indicate arid conditions during the LGM. Much of this was probably caused by drier conditions, whereas some records that rely on the amounts of pollen, for example, could rather be reflecting the physiological aridity caused by low atmospheric CO2 levels. The results help explain the findings (5) that the terrestrial biosphere in the preindustrial era (about 270 ppm) stored about 30% more carbon than it did at the LGM.

The increase of CO2 concentration and temperature from the LGM to the early interglacial led to an increase in the hydrological cycle, the greater growth of trees, which use the C3 pathway of photosynthesis, less reliance on CO2-concentrating mechanisms on land and in the water, and the consequent depletion of 13C (more negative d13C) in the total organic matter (TOC, total organic carbon) found in the lake sediments (1).

Both photosynthesis and the enhanced greenhouse effect are more sensitive to CO2 levels when the concentrations are low. The translation of increased photosynthesis to increased growth rate is not straightforward, depending on developmental processes (6). The effects of the 180-ppm increase from the LGM to the present 360 ppm should be much greater than the effects of going from 360 to 540 ppm, the latter being twice the preindustrial level (about 270 ppm). The plants of today are much less water- and CO2-limited than they were at the LGM. Nevertheless, one suspects that the direction of change in the near future will be the same as that following the LGM, one of increased "effective rainfall," with the agricultural and ecological consequences that follow. Given that the availability of water for agriculture is already becoming such a problem, this aspect, at least, of atmospheric change is a welcome one.

References

F. A. Street-Perrott et al., Science 278, 1422 (1997). T. E. Cerling et al., Nature 389, 153 (1997). R. F. Sage, Global Change Biol. 1, 93 (1995). S. C. Wong, I. R. Cowan, G. D. Farquhar, Nature 282, 424 (1979). M. J. Bird, J. J. Lloyd, G. D. Farquhar, ibid. 371, 566 (1994). J. Masle, G. S. Hudson, M. R. Badger, Plant Physiol. 103, 1075 (1993).

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 20, 2009 9:13 PM

Hi Jeff: you say that I "do not understand basic ecology". If so, please blame my main sources, including Graham Farquhar and James Ehleringer et al et al. If I am wrong so are they. I see you still have not explained why you ignore Graham's paper in Phil Trans of the Royal Society on CO2 and the Amazon. But then I am rapidly forming the view that the world of "Science" (sic) is inhabited by at least as many if not more charlatans and fraudsters (led by Susie and Chris) as the financial world of the Madoffs, BoA, Merrills, RBS, etc etc. At least your mates at ABN Amro made a killing when they sold themselves to RBS, I hope you got a cut!

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 21, 2009 7:21 AM

Shorter Tim C: Arrhenius was an eugenicist in his spare time, so his discoveries on the greenhouse effect are discredited.

So if your heart or kidneys ever fail - or more likely liver? - you will of course refuse any offers of transplants. For the crucial science on histocompatibility was done by Aléxis Carrel, another passionate eugenicist; and unlike Arrhenius, an adviser to a government (Vichy France) which was prepared to carry out recommendations for mass murder of the mentally unfit.

Posted by: James Wimberley | February 21, 2009 9:22 AM

Jeff: you said, "we have introduced a vast array of species into non-native ecosystems where they are wreaking havoc". Just yesterday it was reported (The Australian) that the township worst affected by the Victoria fires, Marysville, (over 100 dead), has just 3 houses still standing, all of which had English (deciduous) trees, and on its oak lined main street just 3 succumbed. Here in Canberra my house is in the direct line of fire, and we have got rid of our native eucalypts, replacing them with oaks and maples etc. You added: "Pretty well all of these contrarians dismiss ecological models and studies at variable scales which suggest that differing species in interacting webs will respond differently to various anthropogenic changes" Jeff, just write a paper refuting the ecological models of Farquhar et al., then get back to me, you have yet to say what is wrong with his paper on CO2 and the Amazonian rainforest. I need to know as I cite it.

Then you add that I "expunge a stupendous array of biotic processes in generating your world view." No, I don't. But remember Occam's razor. You go on "The fact is that you are essentially saying that humans can manage immensely complex systems whose functioning we barely understand by 'staying the course'." We have done quite well so far, mainly by "laissez faire", that is by adaptation rather than management, our governments have shown again and again that they could not manage a shoeshine stall efficiently.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 22, 2009 6:24 AM

Bernard J: you asked the following questions. 1. "Do you believe that warming is in train?" No, the base year data (1850-1900) in both GISS and HADCrut is fatally flawed by excluding tropical Africa,which is a HOT place, and had no measuring stations AT ALL before 1900. There is also a problem with the sudden lapse of records from COLD Siberia after 1990. In truth there was NIL global warming between 1900 and 2000, and according to Arrhenius, it follows that with NIL temp increase arising from 40+% increase in [CO2] since 1900, there will probably be cooling for the next 60% increase in [CO2]. 2. "D you accept that evapotranspiration changes with warming?" I accept that this increases with warming if any - and the result in higher precipitation. Even the cretinous IPCC admits that water vapour resides in the atmosphere for at most 10 days. 3. "Where evapotranspiration changes will occur around the planet, have you determined how they impact upon the locations of future arable agricultural land, and how they will impact upon the health of the planet's ecosystems?' Yes, all over the place, as now, floods in Queensland, droughts in SE Australia. NET effect = positive. 4. "Do you understand that altering the input of substrates and nutrients into a biological system alters the trophic dynamics of the system?" Yep, but so what, again, probably no NET or only positive changes globally. 5. "How does [sic] the alterations inherent in the scenario in question 4 interact with the impacts in question 3?" NET = ZERO or POSITIVE 6. "Have you quantified the pre-industrial productivity of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of productivity for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?" YES. But see Maddison, I rely on his data to 1750 and my own as well as his since then. 7. "Have you qualified the pre-industrial trophic fluxes of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of flux for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?" Yep, watch this space! 8. "Who, if indeed any, has reviewed and confirmed and/or corrected your work?" My Quadrant piece had 3 peer reviewers, albeit for another journal, but that could not find space until about June, and has little impact in Australia, so given that Garnaut is already dead and buried here, I opted for bigger and more immediate impact. BTW, I have reason to believe that one of the 3 was RG himself or one of his mates as I was never allowed to see his/their review (internal evidence would have given him/them away. I accept peer review anonymity, but not confidentiality of the review itself!). The other 2 refs were more professional and I incorporated all their suggested changes. My forthcoming "CO2 Fertilization" piece has already had 2 favourable peer reviews, one I gather was an IPCC lead author. 9. "What are you doing to ensure that you follow through with your complaints of scientific fraud, conspiracy and incompetence that you have directed at the individuals and organisations mentioned above?" I am working on this, I've had previous indirect contacts with Slater & Gordon and their successful (for them, c $30 million pay off) class action against what is now de facto Ross Garnaut's majority owned Ok Tedi mine in PNG. I look forward to equally or better fruitful cooperation. Check the dictionary definitions for fraud. Systematic rejection of any role for biospheric absorption of [CO2], as by K & T & F, Sue's co-authors, is as much a fraud on the people of this planet as anything managed by Bernie Madoff.
10. "If you do not intend to follow through with the accusations referred to in the previous question, upon what moral basis do you base your inaction?" I do intend, so watch this space.

Meantime, dear Bernard, what if anything have you ever published in the cause of the advancement of Knowledge. Don't be falsely modest!

Best

Tim

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 22, 2009 7:33 AM

Tim Curtin said: "No, the base year data (1850-1900) in both GISS and HADCrut (sic) is fatally flawed by excluding tropical Africa,which is a HOT place, and had no measuring stations AT ALL before 1900. There is also a problem with the sudden lapse of records from COLD Siberia after 1990".

If anyone needed any more evidence that Tim Curtin does not have a clue what he is talking about he has presented ample evidence in these few words where he manages to make at least 4 errors which any high school student interested in climate science would recognize.

Firstly, the base period for GISS is not 1850-1900 but is 1951-1980.

Secondly, the base period for HadCRUT is not 1850-1900 but is 1961-1990.

Thirdly, you do not understand what the temperature data presented in these graphs mean. They are temperature anomalies, not actual temperatures. Since the baselines are not prior to 1900 as you claim, omitting tropical stations before that date has no effect on the current GISS and HadCRUT data.

Fourthly, leaving out polar data after 1990 would in fact result in lower temperature anomalies since the polar regions are warming up much faster than the global average.

That you have the arrogance to belittle eminent scientists (when they are correct) and you haven't a clue about their work is pathetic. Keep it up, people like you do more to discredit the AGW deniers by showing how ignorant of the science you really are.

Posted by: Ian Forrester | February 22, 2009 7:53 PM

Tim Curtin, can you please re-write your comments when you are sober or not stoned so we can have at least a chance of making sense of them?

Posted by: Ian Forrester | February 23, 2009 12:25 AM

Jeff; thanks for refs. I've checked Levin's book, but finding it has been commended by paul Ehrlich is enough to put one off it. However I persevered. He ends with “eight commandments of environmental management”: (1) reduce uncertainty, (2) expect surprise, (3) maintain heterogeneity, (4) sustain modularity, (5) preserve redundancy, (6) tighten feedback loops, (7) build trust, and (8) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Splendid, but after some 30 years experience as a policy adviser, I can't recall any of my ministers knowing what to do next on the basis of all this. Why does Levin leave out "faith hope and charity"?

Ian. What can you not understand? Do try and follow Levin's 8th.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 23, 2009 12:45 AM

Tim Curtin.

Ian Forrester has already responded in damning fashion to your answer (1) at #188 about the existence of warming. To this I would add that you did not in any way refute the enormous bodies of data, whether at global or local levels, that indicate that warming has been definitively observed over the last century, whatever baseline is considered. Just how is it that countless scientifically acquired datasets are all incorrect in showing the warming trend, when based on consistently stable 'baselines'?

To my question #2: "Do you accept that evapotranspiration changes with warming?" you replied:

I accept that this increases with warming if any - and the result in [sic] higher precipitation. Even the cretinous IPCC admits that water vapour resides in the atmosphere for at most 10 days.

Your observation about 'higher precipitation' is an obfuscation, because it implies that evapotranspirative water loss is returned in short order at the place where it originated. Erm, how are you wrong? Let me count the ways... Can you guess what some of them might be?

I asked at question 3: "Where evapotranspiration changes will occur around the planet, have you determined how they impact upon the locations of future arable agricultural land, and how they will impact upon the health of the planet's ecosystems?"

to which you replied:

Yes, all over the place, as now, floods in Queensland, droughts in SE Australia. NET effect = positive.

Firstly, you are conflating weather events with long-term climate shiftings (in the case, in evapotranspiration).

Secondly, you have made no response to the issue of how altered evapotransirative (ET) regimes will cause arable land locations to shift.

Thirdly, you have made no comment about the impact of ET shifts on global ecosystems, beyond a vague hand-waving "NET effect = positive" with absolutely no evidence provided!

To my fourth question: "Do you understand that altering the input of substrates and nutrients into a biological system alters the trophic dynamics of the system?", you replied:

Yep, but so what, again, probably no NET or only positive changes globally.

you again provide not one atom of evidence to demonstrate that you either understand the alterations of trophic dynamics, or to indicate what, in your opinion, these alterations will be, beyond your "probably no NET or only positive changes globally".

Given that there are many solidly-supported examples for negative effects in the scientific literature, at both local and at global levels, you are showing yourself to be profoundly ignorant and/or misinformed.

Similarly, with question 5: "How does [sic] the alterations inherent in the scenario in question 4 interact with the impacts in question 3?"

all you can come up with is "NET = ZERO or POSITIVE". You provide no evidence, and no indication that you even understand the processes alluded to in this question (and in the preceding ones).

All that you have done is present a statement of what you want the answer to be.

For my question 6 I asked:

Have you quantified the pre-industrial productivity of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of productivity for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?

and you reply "YES. But see Maddison, I rely on his data to 1750 and my own as well as his since then".

Again, you demonstrate no evidence of actual comprehension of the question, nor do you provide any evidence of the data you refer to, or how these data (and especially yours) are relevant to the question.

To my seventh question:

Have you qualified the pre-industrial trophic fluxes of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of flux for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?

You say only "Yep, watch this space!"

Oh, we'll be watching alright. I wait with eager anticipation you extensive determinations of species-level biomasses, of isotope analyses, of dietary compositions, of food-web constructions, of energy gains and losses, and a host of other processes that underlie the field of trophic analysis.

You're on notice Curtin.

For question 8 I asked "Who, if indeed any, has reviewed and confirmed and/or corrected your work?" and you replied:

My Quadrant piece had 3 peer reviewers, albeit for another journal, but that could not find space until about June, and has little impact in Australia, so given that Garnaut is already dead and buried here, I opted for bigger and more immediate impact.

First, your Quadrant piece (of...?) does not provide any evidence to refute any of the science that you have been critical of on this thread. It does not prove any evidence to support the 'answers' that you provided to my questions as discussed in this post. Your 'work' is not supported by whatever review occurred of your Quadrant article.

Secondly, Quadrant reviewers (where they actually exist) are not known for their scientific prominence.

Thirdly, three reviewers 'for another [anonymous] journal' do not constitute credible review at all. Without knowing which journal it was, there is no standing implied, and even if there were, one does not publish in a second journal and claim credence because of submission for 'review' to a first journal.

Furthermore, and as an aside, it is poor practice to submit for review to one journal, and then to withdraw and publish in another (rarely reviewed) journal - unless the first journal rejected the piece... Your comment:

BTW, I have reason to believe that one of the 3 was RG himself or one of his mates as I was never allowed to see his/their review (internal evidence would have given him/them away. I accept peer review anonymity, but not confidentiality of the review itself!). The other 2 refs were more professional and I incorporated all their suggested changes.

makes me wonder about the nature of the review in this 'other journal'.

My forthcoming "CO2 Fertilization" piece has already had 2 favourable peer reviews, one I gather was an IPCC lead author.

You still don't understand the difference between a nutrient and a substrate, do you? To where did you submit this 'piece', and upon what evidence do you gather that an IPCC lead author reviewed it?

Arriving at question 9:

What are you doing to ensure that you follow through with your complaints of scientific fraud, conspiracy and incompetence that you have directed at the individuals and organisations mentioned above?

your entertaining response was:

I am working on this, I've had previous indirect contacts with Slater & Gordon and their successful (for them, c $30 million pay off) class action against what is now de facto Ross Garnaut's majority owned Ok Tedi mine in PNG. I look forward to equally or better fruitful cooperation. Check the dictionary definitions for fraud. Systematic rejection of any role for biospheric absorption of [CO2], as by K & T & F, Sue's co-authors, is as much a fraud on the people of this planet as anything managed by Bernie Madoff.

From this I can only conclude that you intend to pursue legal action against Crafts-Brandner and Salvucci, Field, Taub et al, Solomon et al, Nature, Science, PNAS, the IPCC - amongst others.

Interesting.

I will 'watch this space' with anticipation, and I am sure that other commenters here will be as interested.

Might I suggest that, if you truly believe the theories that you espouse, you collaborate with a scientist or two? I suggest that you invite Jennifer Marohasy to lend her biologist credentials to support the many paradigm-shifting ideas that you are promoting - in fact, I'll save you the bother and publicly invite her, here and now, to put her scientific credibility, such as it is, behind your ideas.

How about it Jennifer - will you sign your name to Tim Curtin's papers so that he might be more seriously considered for main-stream publication? Will you lend your name to support his critical correspondence and his legal action against the parties mentioned three paragraphs above?

In fact, whilst we're at it, how about you ask Ian Mott, Louis Hissink, Gordon Robertson, Graeme Bird, the litigious Christopher Monckton et al to support you in a class action? And I am sure that Cohenite would be happy to act as your legal representation. Invite them all to join your crusade. They all read Deltoid, or have done so, so you could even offer the invitation here.

Of course, you need publicity too. Why not ask Michael Duffy to give you air-time with which to summarise your rebuttal of the conventional scientific understanding of plant physiology, of ecological structure and function, and of trophic dynamics. Most particularly you can reveal to the audience at large how the world's best scientific practitioners and organisations are conspiring to suppress knowledge of fraud and incompetence. Perhaps you could add your voice to the conspiracy of AGW too.

Invite Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine to publish your scientific revelations in their columns. Heck, I invite them right now to approach you for contributions.

Put your science up Tim Curtin. Demonstrate your competence to comment. Provide your analyses, lay your evidence on the table, and allow your outrageous pseudoscientific nonsense to be properly scrutinised and tested.

What little faff you have provided here supports your claims not one whit. If you actually have any case you need to provide it clearly and concisely for critical appraisal, or your need to stop with your outrageous and slanderous claims once and for all.

Of course, I strongly doubt that you will ever desist, and all that we could conclude from any continuation of the status quo is that your autumn years are reflecting the autumn of your grasp of reality.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 23, 2009 1:55 AM

Bernard. I am flattered by the attention you give to my thoughts. More briefly, let me respond as follows. You said I “did not in any way refute the enormous bodies of data, whether at global or local levels, that indicate that warming has been definitively observed over the last century, whatever baseline is considered. Just how is it that countless scientifically acquired datasets are all incorrect in showing the warming trend, when based on consistently stable 'baselines'?”

Well, just go to GISS, and you will find that from 1900 to 2000, despite all Jim Belsen’s tinkering to make recent years seem hotter, and earlier years colder, all he can come up with is that in 1900 the Global mean temp was 13.9 oC and in 2000 just 14.33 oC, a staggering increase of 0.43 oC. To achieve that he had to use New York temps in 1900 as proxies for Khartoum, Kinshasha, Kampala, Nairobi, Harare, Lusaka etc etc. while in 2000 he probably used all the latter as proxies for Vladivostock etc in 2000, following the collapse of the USSR’s met stations after 1990. Adding insult to injury, Belsen then multiplies all deviations from the average GISS global mean for 1950-1980 by 100 to make them seem much bigger than they are.

To your question #2: "Do you accept that evapotranspiration changes with warming?" I replied: “I accept that this increases with warming if any - and the result is higher precipitation. Even the cretinous IPCC admits that water vapour resides in the atmosphere for at most 10 days”. You say that “my observation about 'higher precipitation' is an obfuscation, because it implies that evapotranspirative water loss is returned in short order at the place where it originated.” But I never said that, evaporation here means rain there as often as not.

Bernard asked at question 3: "Where evapotranspiration changes will occur around the planet, have you determined how they impact upon the locations of future arable agricultural land, and how they will impact upon the health of the planet's ecosystems?" to which I replied: Yes, all over the place, as now, floods in Queensland, droughts in SE Australia. NET effect = positive. To which you Bernard have no answer.

Thirdly, Bernard says I “made no comment about the impact of ET shifts on global ecosystems, beyond a vague hand-waving "NET effect = positive" with absolutely no evidence provided!” Well, just check out IPCC 2007 which shows regional distirubutions quite well (for once).

Bernard’s fourth question was : "Do you understand that altering the input of substrates and nutrients into a biological system alters the trophic dynamics of the system?" I replied: ‘Yep, but so what, again, probably no NET or only positive changes globally”; in other words, I consider his proposition has no substance. What on earth does it mean? I am sure Bernard himsself cannot explain it.

Bernard rants on, with question 5: "How do the alterations inherent in the scenario in question 4 interact with the impacts in question 3?" Goodness knows, what on earth does he mean?

For his question 6 he asked: “Have [I] quantified the pre-industrial productivity of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of productivity for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?” I replied "YES. But see Maddison, I rely on his data to 1750 and my own as well as his since then". I just received today Maddison’s article in World Economics Jan 2009 which answers this question for me.

Bernards’s seventh question: “Have you qualified the pre-industrial trophic fluxes of the world's various ecosystems, and compared the data with your projections of flux for the very same ecosystems under the CO2 concentrations anticipated for the future?” I said "Yep, watch this space!". That still holds, but pro tem check out Colin Prentice et al for an account that matches my own, Ecological Applications, 10(6), 2000.

For question 8 Bernard asked "Who, if indeed any, has reviewed and confirmed and/or corrected your work?" and I replied: “My Quadrant piece had 3 peer reviewers, albeit for another journal, but that could not find space until about June, and has little impact in Australia, so given that Garnaut is already dead and buried here, I opted for bigger and more immediate impact.”

Bernard; “First, your Quadrant piece (Jan-Feb 2009) does not provide any evidence to refute any of the science that you have been critical of on this thread. It does not provide any evidence to support the 'answers' that you provided to my questions as discussed in this post. Your 'work' is not supported by whatever review occurred of your Quadrant article.” Bernard, please check the full online version at either Quadrant Online itself or (updated) at www.lavoiser.com.au.

“Furthermore, and as an aside, it is poor practice to submit for review to one journal, and then to withdraw and publish in another (rarely reviewed) journal - unless the first journal rejected the piece...” It did not reject, I retained copyright.

Arriving at question 9:

No further comment from me.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 23, 2009 5:10 AM

Tim Curtin.

I was not referring to the periods on which they base their "anomalies' with the sole aim of deriving graphs appearing to show incredible increases in warmth, when the actual increase from 1900 to 2000 is barely discerible on graph plotting the global meana [sic] on the vertical axis with that starting at 0oC [sic] (not 14 as you would have it) (my emphasis)

It seems that your grasp of significant figures, and of graph scales/ranges is sorely lacking. As an apparently professional economist you should be ashamed of this chicanery in the application of data presentation and analysis - it is of a level of non-understanding typical of the worst drudges of Bolt's and Marohasy's uneducated masses.

Do you have any understanding of statistical practice?

Seriously, the logical extention of your 'thought process' would be to graph from around -80C to about +60C, as these are close to the extremes of temperature on Earth. And why stop there - the origin should obviously start at 0 Kelvin.

You are surely Marohasy's darling in your manipulation of graphical representations.

On a different note, you seem to be able to dismiss just about all science that disagrees with your view of the world, and to do so with a cursory word or two about how the authors are fraudulent, incompetent, or both. Given your incisive and encompassing insight into matters biological and climatological, perhaps you would care demonstrate just how penetrating your understanding is, by providing a critical analysis of a paper that spans both climatological matters, and the sensitivity of organisms to changes in their environment as described by Jeff Harvey, myself and others on this and on other threads.

I am interested in reading such a critique from you of "Climate change, coral bleaching and the future of the world's coral reefs" by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, published in Marine and Freshwater Research: 50(8) pp839-66. One page would do, and following the usual scientific conventions for review. You must surely have the capacity to do this easily, given the manner in which you are able to lambast so many other prominent scientists.

Perhaps Jeff and some of the others here will add a paper or two of their choice to help you to demonstrate just how you are able to dissect so much of the science that you have been so ignominiously not recognised as having expertise in.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 23, 2009 6:45 AM

Tim, basically your argument is that if you change the scale so it looks like a small increase, it is. That's moronic. You may think that a global temp increase of 0.43 is tiny, but frankly who cares what you think? Despite your amazing ability at understanding complex phenomena, it is a relevant increase. Why don;t you check what sort of global temp existed the last time there was no ice at the poles. Still not going to look like a lot... If this is the best argument you have, then you have no argument. All you have is a misunderstanding.

Posted by: Nathan | February 23, 2009 7:11 AM

Nathan @#202Tim, said 'basically your argument is that if you change the scale so it looks like a small increase, it is. That's moronic. You may think that a global temp increase of 0.43 is tiny, [YES I DO] but frankly who cares what you think? Despite your amazing ability at understanding complex phenomena, it is a relevant increase. Why don;t you check what sort of global temp existed the last time there was no ice at the poles. Still not going to look like a lot... If this is the best argument you have, then you have no argument. All you have is a misunderstanding. Posted by: Nathan | February 23, 2009 7:11 AM Oh dear, anyone know of any asylum for Nathan?

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 23, 2009 7:46 AM

At #201, in response to the fact that he doesn't address profoundly important aspects of trophic inter-relationships, Tim Curtin says:

Is that my problem, yours, or theirs? I suggest the latter

No Tim Curtin, it is your problem because it indicates that you are not familiar with the science. As to your use of Farquhar, you do the man a disservice with your misinterpretations and inappropriate extrapolations of his work. Have you thought to actually write to him and ask if he supports your interpretations of his work? Then at #203, after I asked you to constructively critique a paper by another eminent scientist, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, in order that you might demonstrate your capacity for scientific understanding, review and synthesis, you come up with:

Sadly, Guldberg is a serial liar. He may have heard of Darwin on the subject of formation of coral reefs, but is so stupid he has never grasped anything of Darwin's amazing intuition. Guldberg like De'ath and the lovely Janice Lough of AIMS at Townsville, the Mata Hari of coral reef science, are serial liars.

So, yet again, a slander against an expert, his colleagues, and their intitution. I presume that you will be writing to them, and to CSIRO publishing (and to Nature and other journals) to demand apologies for their collective scientific misbehaviour? I assume that they will be included in your Slater and Gordon malpractice suit.

And then:

De'ath and Lough are so stoopid they do not realise that if they are right that coral growth rates are declining, that means sealevels are falling not rising per IPCC (Darwin, 1859).

Have you completely and utterly taken leave of any tenuous semblance of sense that you might ever have possessed?! Do you even understand that there is more than one mechanism for impact upon a species' growth rates, and especially that not all mechanisms in the coral example are related to 'falling sealevels'?

At #204, it is not Nathan who requires an asylum. Nathan asked a very straighforward question, which you actually chose to answer, even though your response demonstrates astonishing ignorance of the issues that Nathan and I pressed you upon. In no way did Nathan's challenge of you warrant the unseemly reference to an asylum.

All you seem use for 'evidence' to support your outrageous claims is venom and ignorance - no science.

I ask you yet again - where is your science?

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 23, 2009 8:48 AM

Jeff. That really is progress, I am so glad you like the work of Graham F and Colin P. But then you get it wrong by saying: “Considering that our species consumes more than 40% of the planet's net primary production, and > 50% of net freshwater flows (leaving less and less for the rest of nature), what else can this be called?” These are flows both of which are growing - the net primary production grows every year rather faster than the growth rates of both CO2 and world population (<2% p.a.), and global precipitation is also growing, most spectacularly across northern Australia over the last 100 years, but elsewhere as well. True there are droughts, as in the latte-chardonay belt of Victoria, but I am inclined to believe that is divine retribution for their adherence to the likes of Karoly and Enting. You added: “Humans are dominating nature and are attempting to take over more and more of it” – we always have sought to and will increasingly succeed (read Darwin again). You keep citing the Living Planet Index, but its authors do not know the difference between income and capital. What have been the changes in mean temp in The Netherlands since 1900 to date? My home village near Bristol has recorded no change over the last 30 years.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 24, 2009 4:26 AM

Tim Curtin.

Your attacks on so many eminent scientists staggers me even now, when I had thought that my estimation of your extremeness could not be heightened.

I am curious - in all of the thousands of papers that support the evidence for AGW, for ocean acidification, for habitat loss, alteration and simplification, for ecosystem damage through the introduction of feral/weed species and of pollution, for exaggerated species decline and extinction resulting from human impact, for trophic dynamics that are described in a very different fashion to the extraordinary ignorance of thermodynamics and of closed-system limits that you posted at #298, and for many other scientifically documented phenomena - do you give credence for professional competence and integrity to any of the scientists who have performed these investigations and have written the papers?

If so, can you give examples of these studies, and explain why they are credibile in your opinion, and the papers mentioned above are not?

I will be very interested to hear of Jeff's correspondence with Farquhar, and to learn exactly how it is that he believes that your interpretations of his and other people's work contradicts the accepted wisdom of tens of thousands of the world's best.

In a way it is a shame that you do not have the capacity to write letters, to those with whom you claim to have corresponded, that are sufficiently adult and dispassionate that they are not caught by the nutcase filters that most academics are forced to use. It would truly be entertaining to see how they would respond to your claims and accusations should they actually find your nuttery worth replying to.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 24, 2009 7:41 AM

"Yes, actually I know him and he helped me get it right".

You, TimC it get it right? Ha! Has Professor Farquhar been reading this thread? I can't believe that your bellicose assertions wouldn't have him scrambling for cover.

"P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, M.E. Mann, G.A. Schmidt, C.M. Ammann, all known dissemblers specializing in economy with the truth". So says Tim Curtin, renowned scientist and assembler of facts. NOT.

Lastly, Tim, its a bit rich from you arguing that AGW pundits never admit to error. You do not understand basic ecology and you have the gall to say this; since when have you ever admitted to error? Or is this an impossibility in your view?

Bernard, the most important thing I can say in response to Tim's histrionics is this: science has already vanquished most of his pedantic arguments. The vast majority of the scientific community realize that humans are simplifying complex natural systems at an astounding rate and that, as a consequence, their ability to generate a range of critical services that sustein us is being impeded. Page after page of journals like Global Change Biology, Ecosystems, Ecology, Oikos, Journal of Animal Ecology, Ecology Letters, Trend in Ecology and Evolution, Oecologia, Journal of Ecology, Biological Conservation, Conservation Biology, Functional Ecology, Basic and Applied Ecology, not to mention Nature, Science, PNAS and many others are filled with articles showing that a range of human activities are having profoundly deleterious effects on the health and vitality of natural systems and the species and genetically distinct populations that make them up. The fact that between 10 and 40 per cent of well-studied species are currently threatened with extinction or endangered, is unequivocal proof that we are headed in the wrong direction. The fact that this list grows year by year is even more worrying. Songbird declines in North America, where the status of most species is known, are pandemic. Given that extinctions can lag behind habitat loss by decades or even centuries, as discussed by Tilman and May in their seminal 1994 Nature paper, makes one realize that the worst is probably yet to come.

If Tim bothered to get off of his butt and attend some of the major conferences and workshops where these issues are discussed and argued, I would give his arguments more creedence. But I would like to know the last major ecological conference or workshop Tim attended. I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer. It seems to me that, with respect to issues like climate or ecology, everyone thinks that they are an expert. No university study is required, just a good knowledge of satatistics or economics and one can become an 'armchair expert'. Even this isn't always necessary. I've argued global change with people before like junior high school students on blog sites whose comments were actually at grade school level. But they had a lot of sympathizers if their views resonated with the orthodoxical views of those on the libertarian wing of the political right who don't actually give a s@(# about the science, but were using and abusing science to promote their own personal political agendas.

Note that yesterday Tim resorted to the usual smear to dismiss Paul Ehrlich, one of the most esteemed ecologists in the world, winner of the Craaford Prize (given in lieu of the Nobel Prize to fields such as ecology) and the author of more than 300 papers and 30 books. Paul's early work on plant-insect co-evolution with Peter Raven is amongst the most important in our understanding of dietary breath in insects and in driving selection for allelochemical defenses in plants. Paul has been an inspiration to em for many years, and his courage to cross the threshold between academia and the public domain was a very risky venture in the 1960s, when it was not considered proper. Nowadays, it is wonderful to see so many scientists entering the public domain to discuss important and relevant environmental issues. Many of these men and women have invested their careers in unraveling ecological complexity and are the most qualified in being able to argue about the seriousness of the current bottleneck that our species has created for itself. As I said earlier, humans are living off of a one-time in heritance of natural capital and are spending it like there is no tomorrow. As a result, natural systems are in decline. There is very broad consensus on this point. The coencern is, given how little we know about the functioning of natural systems, is how far we can push them before they are unable to sustain themselves, and, ultimately, us. Irrespective of Tim's rants, most ecologists agree on this point: humans are reducing the capacity of the plant to support much of the world's biodiversity. Because biodiversity constitutes the working parts of our planetary life-support systems, there is widespread concern that continued simplification will undermine many critical ecosystem services. This is where we stand at present. There may be a few scientific 'outliers' with respect to this point, but they are very, very few of them; they are a very small minority of the opinion of the community of population ecologists and environmental scientists. This closes the debate, as far as I am concerned.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 24, 2009 8:04 AM

Please explain to me why you think reducing [CO2] from today’s 385 ppm to Hansen’s 350 ppm would have no negative effects on world food production, or in other words, why reducing last year’s gross emissions of about 10 GtC to say 2 GtC (the 80% that Garnaut hoped for) would have ZERO effects on the net primary productivity of the globe’s oceanic and terrestrial biospheres, given their net increases in CO2 absorption last year of nearly 6 GtC???

again:

the effect of elevated CO2 on food production is tiny.

other effects on food production are huge.

"food production" is at best (similar to biomass) 2-3% of CO2 uptake.

increased CO2 will increase food production by 20-30% (i am taking the words of those selling CO2 to greenhouses here!!!!) over a century. just look at what food production did over the last century...

Posted by: sod | February 25, 2009 2:30 AM

Sod: you used to be more cogent. When you say “the effect of elevated CO2 on food production is tiny”, that is nonsense. What is food if not CO2 mixed with H2O and N to produce carbohydrates and protein? I have NEVER said CO2 is the only input. The facts remain that rising [CO2] is associated with rising food production above and beyond what would be expected given new varieties (for which rising [CO2] is a necessary condition) and actual fertilizer consumption. You added: “'food production’ is at best (similar to biomass) 2-3% of CO2 uptake” So what embodies the 98% of uptake? I use the term “food” to encompass the feedstock for all living creatures. Trees in my garden produce feed for some 60 bird species, according to Rosemary, our local birdwatcher. Finally, you said: “increased CO2 will increase food production by 20-30% (i am taking the words of those selling CO2 to greenhouses here!!!!) over a century. just look at what food production did over the last century...” That is a falsification: adding CO2 in a greenhouse up to 1000 ppm produces an instantaneous increase of 30%+ in yield which over 100 years adds up to a lot of guilders.

Jeff at #215. You just don’t get it and never will. Just produce stats to substantiate your claim that e.g. “We know that above and below ground interactions can have profound effects upon the production of plant biomass, and that these may dwarf any effects of changes in atmospheric C02 within the range that Tim harps on about”. Data, refs, or just your usual armwaving?. Have you ever produced a verifiable statement of fact at Deltoid? Not to my knowledge. Thus your final comment is simply absurd: “That's why it's utterly useless to think that an increase in atmospheric C02 is needed to eliminate hunger". I never said that, what I do say is that rising uptakes of [CO2] MUST manifest in increased food for somebody somehere, if only for the zillions of termites in Africa and Australia, and that REDUCING [CO2] will be bad for us and for said termites, et al. Prove me wrong with evidence and citations. You will have a problem, because nobody on the Stern-Garnaut-Solomon-IPCC gravy train has ever or will ever even contemplate this issue.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 25, 2009 6:20 AM

Tim, there are a number of studies which conclusively show that plant growth and survival, as well as dominance, is affected by the accumulation of soil pathogens. Work by David Wardle, John Klironomos, as well as our recent paper in Nature (Engelkes et al., in which I am a co-author) reveal that invasive and native plants differ in their responses to soil history - meaning that there soil-plant feedbacks are important. A study by Packer and Clay (Nature, 2000) similarly found that the survival of seedlings of Prunus serotina is affected by the proximity of the seedlings to the parent plant, which has accrued high levels of pathogens in its rhizosphere.

So what will enahnced atmospheric C02 levels mean for these kinds of soil-plant feedbacks? And for the status of dominant versus interstitial plants? It is hard to know. But sticking your head in the sand and saying, "Well, we haven't studied this yet, so therefore it isn't a problem", as you appear to be doing, is just pathetic. What we know is that plant growth, survival, and fitness depends on innumerable biotic and abiotic processes in the soil and above-ground domains that you habitually ignore. We know that for insects carbon is not a limiting nutrient but that nitrogen is. Reducing C02 is not necessarily bad for insect herbivores because it means that they have more access to nitrogen in plant tissues. In an increased C02 environment, it is likely that nitrogen and phosphorus will be shunted out of plant tissues to accomodate the increased C02. We can therefore expect insects to compensate by feeding more to accrue the necessary nitrogen to optimize their own growth and fitness. This means more damage to plants growing under higher C02 regimes. Moreover, as I have said many times, increased atmospheric C02 will lead to competitive assymetries amongst soil and above-ground consumers over several trophic levels. Drigo et al. showed in her recent PhD thesis here that in elevated C02 regimes there is increased competitiona amongst soil microbes and mycorrhiza that lead to the exclusion of some species and the dominance of others. This reduces functional redundancy by reducing species diversity - redundancy is important in maintaining the integrity of ecological systems by enabling multiple species to fill similar ecological roles (or functions). By reducing redundancy, a system is pushed closer to its edge.

Basically, its clear to me that you do not understand any of this, so you ignore or downplay it. You focus on simple linear correlations which exclude a wide array of other processes. How many articles do you read in which trophic interactions are explored in plant communities? Again, your pontifications assume that plant growth is free of biotic constraints, and only respond to cycles of carbon. This, of course, is a grade school level of understanding of the ways in which natural systems function. You wrongly correlate increased C02 with increased biomass (which is not a givemn as Sod showed) and assume that increased biomass = increased food, while ignoring qualitiative aspects of this biomass. Even if there were biomass produced under increased C02 regimes, this in no way guarantees that the extra biomass is of the same quality (in terms of multiple nutrient acquisition) as plants with slightly lower levels of biomass. And, as I have said, it ignores effects on plant antagonists and mutualists that are a vital component of terrestrial systems and the way they function. Primary productivity is therefore affected by much, much more than carbon sequestration. Your view of the world is strictly 'bottom-up'. What about trophic cascades, or have you never heard of them?

Its clear that you cannot come up with something better than simple linear correlations which expunge a range of other vitally important parameters. Again, all of your posts reveal an exceedingly poor and simplified view of the natural world.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 25, 2009 7:08 AM

What is food if not CO2 mixed with H2O and N to produce carbohydrates and protein?

as always Curtin, you are talking about complicated stuff, without understanding the basics. here is a simple experiment for you:

get some orchids. beautiful flowers. they need water. actually we can show, that they prosper better, with more water. so keep adding water. lots of water. after a few days, they will die. but who want orchids anyway. some other plants will take their place. algae, fungi, LOTS of plants. and one day, there will be some orchids again...

So what embodies the 98% of uptake? I use the term “food” to encompass the feedstock for all living creatures. Trees in my garden produce feed for some 60 bird species, according to Rosemary, our local birdwatcher.

you might want to google the term "algae pest".

you are living in a dreamland. changes in the environment benefit certain species more than others. the best thing about nature is variety. many changes made by mankind, remove variety. our livestock and crops don t grow in ADDITION to orchids and wolfs. they live INSTEAD.

the trees in the gardens of many people don t feed any birds at all. because they are foreign plants, that aren t eaten by local birds. or that a prefered by ONE very common bird, and replace trees that were the food of very rare birds.

That is a falsification: adding CO2 in a greenhouse up to 1000 ppm produces an instantaneous increase of 30%+ in yield which over 100 years adds up to a lot of guilders.

i know that you would like to increase CO2 in our atmosphere to 1000 ppm immediately. thank god, this wont happen. instead, it will take about a century (if we don t change things) to levels that are similar to greenhouse environments. that is the century, i was talking about. using the last century as a guideline, we would do things significantly wrong, if an increase by 30% would be very significant over such a time. and again, this are maximum effects for plants that profit, taking from advertisement. and it is ignoring all other effects that CO" and global warming will have...

Posted by: sod | February 25, 2009 7:28 AM

Tim Curtin.

There is unfortunately a bit of a crisis in my family at the moment, so for the foreseeable future I won't have the luxury for taking time to address the perpetual and prodigious stream of nonsense that you manifest on this and on other threads. As much as trying to ensure that your pseudoscience does not gain credibility anywhere at all is a worthy endevour in my eyes, looking out for those dear to me wins hands down.

However, whilst I am away I would like you to consider sloths and koalas, and to tell us why their biology makes a lie of your claims of trophic Eutopia.

And as you gagged at the thought of reviewing Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, perhaps your can review some of the seminal works of Edward O. Wilson, Sylvia Earl, Tom Lovejoy, and Stephen Schneider and explain why you think their conclusions are incorrect, fraudulent, and/or incompetent. These eminent biologists certainly contradict everything you say.

I am sure that Jeff, sod, Ian and others will be on the ball to scrutinise your answer and to keep you on the straight and narrow if I am unable to check in for the next few days.

Happy sciencing.

Oh, and please be sure to keep us all appraised of your correspondence. Given the rate at which you contradict or refute everything that Jeff, sod, Ian and I try to educate you about, you must be busy indeed seeking out the authors of the many thousands of papers, and the dozens of journals that published them, in order to demand retractions and apologies.

And how's the paradigm-busting monograph coming along? It must be a bushel-hidden nut indeed, because nothing that you have produced thus far has anything like the form of a scientific argument about it. Hint: random formulæ and quantities are meaningless without a discussion or their context, of their derivations, of their relationships to relevant information, and a provision of sufficient supporting references that are not misinterpreted. Yes, I know that it takes time, and indeed that a thread such as this might not be the best forum for such detail, but if you have properly worked on the phenomena that you espouse you surely have the material documented in workbooks, in spreadsheets, and in manuscript drafts.

For the umpteenth time, show us your science.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 25, 2009 9:54 AM

Tim, I asked you: have you heard of trophic cascades? Have you ever heard of the green world hypothesis? This stipulates that top-down (natural enemy control) may be an important determinant of plant biomass, and not only bottom-up (plant- or nutrient-mediated) factors. Recent meta analyses by the likes of Halaj, Wise, Schmitz, Hamback etc. examined the potential for trophic cascades in terrestrial habitats (we know already they are well defined in aquatic habitats) but found evidence for them in terrestrial habitats as well, PARTICULARLY IN SIMPLE HABITATS OR IN PLANT MONOCULTURES. This means that agricultural systems and habitats dominated by one or only a few species are characterized by strong top-down as well as bottom-up pressures. The entire basis of classical biological control hinges on the existence of trophic cascades.

The conclusion is that the production of plant biomass and plant fitness can often depend strongly on the role of natural enemies in suppressing herbivore and pathogen populations. This is very relevant for this discussion, because you totally exempt the second trophic level and higher from your equations. You act as if herbivores and their natural enemies don't exist, and that plant growth and biomass production are not at all affected by more complex biotic processes. Moreover, you also ignore interactions with soil-borne organisms, such as nematodes, earthworms, mites and bacteria, which are vitally important. Some years ago there was an attempt to re-grow confierous trees in a habitat that had been clear cut several months earlier in the US Rocky Mountains. Seedlings were carefully plated, but within a few weeks to months they all began to die. The US forest service and biologists were mystified, but on closer examination it was found that the constant movement of heavy logging eqipment - trucks, bulldozers etc. - had compressed the soil and had seriously harmed the biotic soil community which was essential for the plants. Many mutualists were destroyed.

In all of your posts, you habitually exclude trophic interrelationships. Most of those promulgating the same story as you do so as well. I have yet to see an article expounding the benefits of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide on plant growth and food productivity take any of these complex biotic interactions into account (please send me any that do). As I have said a million times, Tim, your thinking on this is strictly and simply linear. Thus: Increase parameter 'A' (C02) and this benefits agent 'B' (plant growth). But along the way you completely ignore biotic agents 'C' through 'Z' which play a vital role in system productivity. Without a better understanding of these effects, we are groping blindly in the dark. One cannot extrapolate as you do on the basis of simple permutations.

I am frankly getting tired of having to repeat this refrain. Whether you like it or not, Tim, the vast majority of the scientific community would agree with me on this. They know well enough that such linear extrapolations on complex adaptive systems are not viable, espeically given the fact that humans are dominating and altering vast swathes of the biosphere. You and a few others are very much out on a limb, and, as a consequence your views do not hold much water.

What it all comes down to is the applicability of the precautionary principle. This is the crux. You believe that we need 100% evidence that current human activities are pushing our ecological life-support systems towards the edge, and, lacking that, we ought to do nothing or very little to alter our current course. More importantly, you believe that the current global experiment - for it is precisely that - in which we continue to pump out vast amounts of greenhouse gases, and alter natural systems in a myriad of other ways, should be continued on the basis of very, very fragmentary evidence of either no deleterious consequences or even of benefits. Again, in my view as a scientist, this is utter folly. The broad view amongst environmental scientists is that the consequences of continuing along the same path could be very grave. I therefore believe that there is enough evidence on the declining quality of natural systems as a result of various human activities to take remedial action.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 26, 2009 8:16 AM

If the increase of [CO2] by c. 10% since 1980 is associated with increased world food production of 60% after taking into account fertilization usage, temperature, rainfall, and new varieties

Posted by: Hugh | February 26, 2009 9:06 AM

As I have a quiet minute from the current turmoil at home...

Tim: how are the reviews and the letters coming along? Have you sorted out those abominable wrinkles in ecology yet?

And have you learned the lesson that koalas and sloths (amongst many others) offer?

Jeff (at the end of #227): I have thought on this myself this frequently over the months, and especially over the life of this thread. The thing that keeps me plugging away is that it appears that folk such as Tim actually believe in their own genius, a la Messrs Dunning and Kruger, and rattle their pots and pans sufficiently loudly that other Denialists, and those predisposed to the Denialist message, take up the false memes.

And it is memes such as these that percolate into the wider community and into the policy frays that cause sufficient inaction to result in significant additional damage over and above what might occur if action was prompt. Even though Quadrant is a sorry rag of a publication these days, it has credibility amongst some and Tim is spinning his appearance there for all he is worth. I shudder to think that he might slip something else out somewhere unchallenged.

Emperor Tim is wearing no clothes. He refuses to look into the mirror, and he refuses to demonstrate that his invisible and diaphenous garments actually have any substance. Nevertheless he insists that he is handsomely and magically attired, and his courtiers are all too ready to agree.

However the rumour of his magnificent wardrobe is hurting the planet, and for this reason I'll keep kicking at his carcass until it pops.

It is interesting (to any critically observant reader) to note that, after more than 200 posts in this thread, he still hasn't responded to my goading, nor to your patient, detailed and referenced explanations, by demonstrating that he has even a rudimentary capacity to incorporate a basic ecophysiological architecture to support his claims and to account for our challenges to the innumerable shortcomings in his (mis)conceptions.

I am reminded of Frank's ironic wont to exhort the "Galileo!" defence. In Tim Curtin's case though, Galileo would be orbiting in his grave.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 26, 2009 11:15 AM

Hi Bernard,

I really appreciate all of your thoughtful posts. I also hope things aren't too tough for you on the home front at the moment. I always look forward to your comments.

As far as Tim is concerned, you've pretty well summed it up perfectly. As I said before, it gets exasperating because it seems like I am speaking to a wall. There's too much simplistic nonsense, in my view, for me to accurately get to all of it. Frankly, I don't have the time. I have a pile of manuscripts to review right now, a few more to write up, a PhD thesis to go through and a grant pre-proposal to get done. The only reason I respond to Tim's musings is because I fear that others who don't know any better might stumble onto this thread, read his posts and somehow derive the opinion that they make sense and are enlightened. Scientists should expend more time crossing the boundry into the public arena and Tim L's excellent site is a good venue for it; hence why I put aside a few minutes each day if I think its worth the trouble.

I have to admit that this thread is wearing a bit thin for me; it might be because there is really nothing more to say. The simple, linear extrapolations that Tim concocts from a few primarily lab-based studies or models just don't give much of a clue how complex adaptive natural systems will respond to the continual human assault, especially as there are so many dimensions on which it is happening. Climate change might just be the final nail in the coffin, particularly since nature has been stressed by man in a multitude of other ways, and that we know that the genetic variability of animal and plant populations, which has already been greatly reduced for many species, is a necessary pre-requisite for their adaptation to further change.

The thrust of my arguments is that humans are tinkering with immensely complex systems and yet, in spite of the efforts expended by countless numbers of ecologists and environmental scientists beavering away all over the world, working at different levels of organization, we still barely understand the rule governing the assembly and function of these systems. In the background we have the pundits telling us that there's nothing to fear, and that the current human experiment is actually likely to produce net benefits for society as opposed to costs. Of course this is madness, given what we do know, and it is in this capacity that I feel that it is imperative to counter the kinds of arguments being produced by Tim Curtin and his ilk. At least I have the practice; I do have to deal with these arguments quite often, usually from lay people and the public, less often from students. But I feel that it is vitally important that scientists expned at least some efforts to counter the Dr. Panglosses of this world.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 26, 2009 11:35 AM

If the increase of [CO2] by c. 10% since 1980 is associated with increased world food production of 60% after taking into account fertilization usage, temperature, rainfall, and new varieties, DESPITE the negatives of your C thru Z, where are you?

Tim, please stop making up those numbers.

here are those from advertisements of the "greenhouse CO2 enrichment industry":

BIBB LETTUCE By adding CO2 to the atmosphere around the plant, a 40% crop increase was achieved. Whereas previous crops averaged 22 heads per basket, lettuce grown in the increased CO2 atmosphere (550 ppm) averaged 16 heads of better quality per basket.

less increase with much more CO2. again: please stop making up numbers!!!

The native birds in my garden, that at times mimic Hitchcock and treat me as a tenant on notice to quit, just love our non-native grapes, and the pods of our japanese elms, etc etc. That is because they have not joined WWF and like all non-human species are opportunist, eating whatever is around and tastes good.

look, i thought your knowledge and understanding of climate related stuff is basically one of the lowest level that can be achieved. now you demonstrated, that you know even less about zoology.

not all species are generalists. one of the best know examples is the koala.

those generalists are most often very common animals already. but yes, cockroach, rat and pigeon are very nice animals as well.

the claim that all non-human species are opportunist, eating whatever is around is simply FALSE.

Posted by: sod | February 26, 2009 12:57 PM

"With my habitual modesty I mention that my lecture was packed, with both Faculty members and research students there".

Says nothing. I gave lectures in Denmark following the Lomborg saga in 2002 and I was told by staff that both lectures at Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities attracted some of the biggest audiences they had ever seen. Theproof of the pudding is one's standing on the international scientific arena. You are firmly at the very back of the queue.

In your case, methinks you overestimate your standing in the field. Where are your peer-reviewed publications? How many times have you been invited to give lectures at Princeton, Stanford, and other US universities? How many reviews have you made for scientific journals on this and related topics? A bit of humility would go a long way, Tim. As it stand, your views are somewhere way out in the distant mists. Given that you ignore ecological realities, and the fact that solving world hunger is a political, not a scientific problem, you are whistling in the wind. I do not place much stock in people arguing that humans should continue conducting a single non-replicatable global experiment on immensely complex systems with all kinds of possible outcomes, because they think they have found what they think is a simple linear positive correlation in one variable (and this is certainly not proven). The worst thing is to exclude all other possible outcomes because they are poorly understood due to the infancy of the field. Yet that is what you are saying.

I would take your message to the developing world. I find it hard to envisage the desperate populations in the developing world begging the west to pump more C02 into the atmosphere to enable them to increase their crop production. The elites in the north and their counterparts in the south know all-too-well what underlies the current predicament. And it ain't a shortage of C02. Its equity and social justice.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | February 27, 2009 3:48 AM

Jeff: You say your lectures attacking Lomborg were well attended. What happened to your follow up publications, with such an eager audience? I have yet to see in print any coherent and sustained refutation of Lomborg, who has however attracted the participation of some very eminent Nobel winners in his Copenhagen series. I did see the serially dishonest attack on Lomborg by none other than Obama's John Holdren, by Ehrlich our of Schneider, congenitally economical like them with the truth as they admit themselves. Lomborg's books are outstanding and have more common sense economics and ecology than any of the ramblings of Stern the IPCC and Garnaut or dare I say it Jeff. You have never on this blog offered any evdience of anything at all. I like to deal in facts and regressions thereof. Where are yours?

You then said "I find it hard to envisage the desperate populations in the developing world begging the west to pump more C02 into the atmosphere to enable them to increase their crop production." Well let's see. Crops will be withering by 2020 if not before if you have your way. [CO2] is scarce, as Freeman Dyson has repeatedly pointed out, and today's annual food output is not sustainable FOR ANY SPECIES at less than 385 ppm. Hugh, for refs, see my submissions to Garnaut at his website and the papers I have posted on the web at my site, see also, for the fully footnoted version of my Quadrant paper, www.lavoisier.com.au

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 27, 2009 6:06 AM

Jeff: Take it easy, Freeman Dyson is spot on, and it will take more than that idiotic blog to debunk one of the finest minds of the last 60 years. You also said: "therefore in my opinion it's just completely illogical to claim that plants need 385ppm to sustain food production". That encapsulates all that lies between us: you think isues of fact (such as, are there black swans?) are matters for logic, whereas I ask you to prove there are no black swans (as was believed before Cap'n Cook). In my example, let's place bets. How much are you willing to pay if global food production as measured by the FAO is less in say 2015 than now if Bali & Copenhagen targets are achieved? Or in whatever year such targets for absolute reduction in emissions to below the present NET absorption rate of 6 GtC p.a. are achieved? Or just show me your regressions for global food output vis a vis [CO2] when the latter is forced from 385 to 350 ppm as demanded by Hansen.

Posted by: Tim Curtin | February 27, 2009 8:25 AM

The slide show is at my website: CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION - AND MASS STARVATION BY 2050?.

there are several explanations. did you only invite denialists? did you hide your plainly false thesis behind your usual scientific confusion speeeches?

why don t you start your next slide show (and the invitaion to your speech) with your claim, that coalas will change their diet to what ever grows in your garden?

I have yet to see in print any coherent and sustained refutation of Lomborg,

you don t read a lot, do you? obviously you missed (for a start) the discussion in scientific american

today's annual food output is not sustainable FOR ANY SPECIES at less than 385 ppm.

as the advertisement of the CO2 SELLING industry says, an increase to 550ppm would give only 30% extra growth. the effect of 385ppm on growth is TINY. fact.

Curtin, this would be the right moment, to ask yourself how did all that Coal and Oil get under the soil?

an increased uptake does NOT directly transfer into an ever growing LIVING biomass. the "C" out of CO2 can also be moved back into coil and to the bottom of oceans...

Posted by: sod | February 27, 2009 11:48 AM

Sod: I was generalising, Koalas are clearly an exception and certainly are in danger of exticntion,

WRONG. generalists are the exception. Curtin, you know absolutely nothing about biology.

not least because of removal of their habitat in Victoria by Green-instigated fires.

WRONG. please educate us: for how long were GREENS dominating the political scene of the region?

Let me "many" species are opportunists and adapt to changed diet availabilities.

a weak claim. what is "many"? 50? out of millions?

you would obviously want to give a percentage number. so how many species are you wiling to give up? keep 90%? or will 50% do?

and even with this massive change to your moronic claim about "all non-human species are opportunist, eating whatever is around" it would still be false in context.

"MANY native birds will switch from local plants/trees to whatever people grow in their gardens" (again) is simply a false claim. sparrows and pigeons are the birds that you will keep.

Posted by: sod | February 27, 2009 10:19 PM

Tim Curtin.

You are surely at the extreme end of the branch of recalcitrant scientific ignorance.

Yet again I will draw attention to the fact that you demonstrate no understanding of basic ecological concepts, nor are you able to describe any mechanism that supports any of the theories that you espouse and that simultaneously refutes the enormous mass of scientific understanding that puts falsity your ideas.

Seriously - how often have you cracked any of the journals Jeff mentioned above? How many papers from those journals have you reviewed and filed in your library?

You pick a few arbitrary datasets and apply regressions to them, and from this you extrapolate an interpretation of global-scale systems of incomprehensible complexity. This is not how a scientist or a statistician uses a regression.

Regression analyses demonstrate correlation, and not causation, and most especially they do not do so in the case of system-decoupled data. To demonstrate causation one must apply experimental methodology to a system, with a priori hypotheses and analytical methodologies already established. Where empirical experimentation is not possible, one can apply more pure statistical methodologies, that incorporate extensive recursive/back-testing procedures, although these are never as 'good' as real-system experimentation.

You have done neither. You could have easily pulled a other hundred parameters out of your arse, as you have already done, and come up with the correlations you present, but that have no relationship to 'productivity'. And r² values are not 'proof' - they merely identify how a 'change' in x relates to a change in 'y' - this does not mean that x actually changed y.

You have no science.

You make claims with no backing; you refute whole disciplines of knowledge with no supporting material. You refuse to address fundamental questions repeatedly put to you, that would scupper your claims if you actually considered them.

You say that pre-industrial biospheric productivity was significantly lower than that post-industrialisation. In one to several paragraphs, can you provide a precise that explains the methodology, the data sources and the references to support this claim?

You say that there is are no increased rates of species extinction, counter to thousands of papers that say otherwise. In one to several paragraphs, can you provide a precise that explains the methodology, the data sources and the references to support your claim?

You say that there is no crisis of habitat loss/fragmentation. In one to several paragraphs, can you provide a precise that explains the methodology, the data sources and the references to support this claim, and that refutes the thousands of papers that recognise the dangers of habitat destruction and fragmentation for biodiversity?

You say that growth of human society is not resource-constrained. In one to several paragraphs, can you provide a precise that explains the methodology, the data sources and the references to support this claim, and that refutes the thousands of papers that recognise the constraint, limitations and asymptotes to growth?

Have you submitted yet your critical correspondence to the authors and the journals mentioned repeated in earlier posts?

You have not yet demonstrated that you understood my reference to koalas and to sloths. I notice that you have gone off on an irrelevant tangent about koalas, so I will provide you with a hint: what is particular about the metabolism of these two taxa (and to many besides) that puts paid to your fantasy about a carbon dioxide-driven Utopia? You may have to learn some real physiology to answer this, so perhaps it is beyond you to address.

Can you describe in one to several paragraphs the scientific methodology that supports the empirical basis for being able to propose the bet with Jeff that you did?

Your reference to an emeritus 'seminar' is a red-herring. I have attended such, and the audience is usually silently po-faced when an emeritus has gone 'emeritus'. The classic example I use is one where two Australian chemists claimed that there was actually a solid basis for cold-fusion. At the end of their presentation, there were many cutting questions that were left unanswered, and the audience politely left it unsaid that there had been no answers.

Again, if you are able to defend your claims, you will do so in detail in front of a forum of experts in the fields that you are refuting. Let us see you do this.

I seriously doubt that Frank Fenner would have condoned the nonsense that you spout. I myself met Frank a number of years ago, and his scientific understandings are aligned with Jeff's, and not with yours. Of course, if I am wrong, I would invite you to seek confirmation of his concurrence with you - it should be easy if, as you say, he supports your ideas.

And then there is:

...today's annual food output is not sustainable FOR ANY SPECIES at less than 385 ppm

Empirical evidence? References?

And what of the fact that EVERY SPECIES, including humans, did just fine and dandy at ~280ppm for millenia? How does that work?

And we've discussed Freeman Dyson several times before. Sadly, he is a not-uncommon example of someone who, although emminent in his own field (or in 'his/her 'time'), can be quite bonkers about matters in which they are not trained, or which they promote in their autumn years. Nobel laureate Cary Mullis of PCR fame is another example, with his increasingly unsupportable notion of the non-HIV model of AIDS.

The only people who might listen to you are those ignorant of the science. If you are trying to attain credibility in the real scientific arena you are failing, simply because you ignore every process, every tenet and just about every fact of science that any half-compenent person is well-aware of.

You might be living happily in the puffed-up belief that you are a hard-hitting player in science, but to anyone who has half a clue you are a sad old troll who is just gumming up the works.

Ad hominem? No, because this is simple fact.

If you disagree, address my points above.

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 28, 2009 3:24 AM

You said "I seriously doubt that Frank Fenner would have condoned the nonsense that you spout... Of course, if I am wrong, I would invite you to seek confirmation of his concurrence with you - it should be easy if, as you say, he supports your ideas." I NEVER said that he did.

So are you then saying that you brought up the emeritus seminar, and its distinguished audience, as an implied testing of your ideas, but a testing that did not actually occur after all?

That sounds like unsupportable name-dropping to me. To impute that someone of Fenner's reputation might agree with you, without his actual doing so, is despicable.

You again: "And what of the fact that EVERY SPECIES, including humans, did just fine and dandy at ~280ppm for millenia?" Really? prove it.

Erm, the fact that biodiversity was greater prior to industrialisation, than in any epoch previously, says a lot. As does the fact that the rates of extinction were lower then than when humans started with their profound impacts upon the biosphere.

I note too that you didn't actually rise to the challenge and attempt to prove the converse...

Maddison shows GDP per capita in 1750 for 6.5 billion people.

Do you think that using fossil fuels at approximately two hundred thousand times the rate at which they formed might have something to do with this?

As to the last paragraph of your post at #245...

1. It is such staggeringly large strawman that the term 'wickerman' is more appropriate. Asking me to dissociate myself from an argument that was not active until you brought it up, and refusing to speak to me based upon an answer that you know a priori I would respond with, is a childish ploy indeed
2. Irrespective of point (1), judging a person by (imputed, no less!) company that they might keep does not constitute an argument to the earlier substance of this thread.
3. You still don't get the bath and water analogy, do you?
4. You are conspicuously avoiding substantively answering any of my, or other people's, challenges to you, and you appear to be desperately fishing now for a reason to permanently run from your inability to answer these many challenges and from justification of your claims.

I'm tempted to [killfile] you as many of the emminently more sensible folk here already have, but I am still waiting for you to start justifying to the long list of scientific balderdash that you manufacture. The company that you keep (I note your comfortable habitation Marohasy's) does not deter me: the only thing that might is the ever-growing extraordinarily long time it is taking you to either present some evidence of scientific understanding, or to concede your ignarance and bugger off back to the shade of the rock from which you crawled in the first place (with apologies to all respectable under-rock dwellers of the non-human biosphere).

Posted by: Bernard J. | February 28, 2009 11:55 AM

I'm tempted to [killfile] you as many of the emminently more sensible folk here already have, but I am still waiting for you to start justifying to the long list of scientific balderdash that you manufacture.

pppppPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPHHhhhhhhhffffffffffffffttttt! HahahahahahaHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Oh, man, Bernard. I spit out my drinkie on the monitor! You vewy funny guy!

Best,

D

Posted by: Dano | February 28, 2009 5:41 PM

It is good to occasionally give Tim Curtin a stage upon which to post. It allows so many of us to take a look, remind ourselves that yep, he really is just as batshit as we remember, and then go on ignoring his ass.

At 249, is Curtin really asserting that "not even" 70% of Darwin's enumerated species are locally extinct, as if that allegation is some kind of support for something he is saying?

Posted by: Lee | February 28, 2009 10:43 PM