Planet-hating beef eaters, cont'd.

Sigh. Another day, another article informing us that our meat consumption -- especially western beef consumption -- is killing the planet. This February 16 AFP article even manages to drag in a comparison with the Hitler of the automotive world:

When it comes to global warming, hamburgers are the Hummers of food, scientists say.

Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week.

That's because beef is such an incredibly inefficient food to produce and cows release so much harmful methane into the atmosphere, said Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Canada.

Pelletier is one of a growing number of scientists studying the environmental costs of food from field to plate.

By looking at everything from how much grain a cow eats before it is ready for slaughter to the emissions released by manure, they are getting a clearer idea of the true costs of food.

The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.

Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.

By the way, that 1:16 ratio of beef to CO₂ emissions cited in the last paragraph seriously undermines the 1:36 ratio claimed by Japanese alarmists in another AFP article we highlighted back in July of 2007.

Kind of makes me wonder if they're just making stuff up.

The sunny side of a global economic collapse

It seems that some on the environmental left would like nothing less than a rollback of the Industrial Revolution, with a vastly reduced human population living sustainably: consuming only locally-produced durable goods and food (grown organically, of course), etc. Living in this manner would cut back on CO2 emissions in countless ways.

From this point of view, the worldwide collapse of financial markets is good news, because the resulting economic slowdown means a reduction in activities (manufacturing, transportation) that result in CO2 emissions. An October 7 Reuters article reports it this way:

A slowdown in the world economy may give the planet a breather from the excessively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions responsible for climate change, a Nobel Prize winning scientist said on Tuesday.

Atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen, who has in the past floated the possibility of blitzing the stratosphere with sulfur particles to cool the earth, said clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth's environmental burden.

Slower economic growth worldwide could help slow growth of carbon dioxide emissions and trigger more careful use of energy resources, though the global economic turmoil may also divert focus from efforts to counter climate change, said Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the depletion of the ozone layer.

"It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage," Crutzen told Reuters in an interview.

"We could have a much slower increase of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere ... people will start saving (on energy use) ... but things may get worse if there is less money available for research and that would be serious."

Gore's plan to bankrupt America

In a remarkable feat of understatement, The New York Times entitled its account of Al Gore's July 17 speech: Gore Urges Change to Dodge an Energy Crisis.

The word "change" has been bandied about so much in the current presidential campaign that people don't expect any specifics to be attached to the word. But Gore cannot be accused of empty rhetoric in this case. He believes that trillions of dollars should be shifted away from keeping our country's economic engine running and toward a complete replacement of our country's energy infrastructure. In ten years.

Gore was in fine TEOTWAWKI form in his Washington speech, as the NYT reports:

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday urged the United States to wean the nation from its entire electricity grid to carbon-free energy within 10 years, warning that drastic steps were needed to avoid a global economic and ecological cataclysm.

Like a modern Jeremiah, Mr. Gore called down thunder to justify the spending of trillions of dollars to remake the American power system, a plan fraught with technological and political challenges that goes far beyond the changes recently debated in Congress and by world leaders.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” he said in a midday speech to a friendly crowd of mostly young supporters in Washington. “And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.”

As this excerpt shows, no cost is too great for you and me to bear, because the future of human civilization is at stake.

“To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider seriously what the world’s scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don’t act in less than 10 years,” he said.

No, no, no... don't evaluate -- there's no time! The time for thinking is over -- it's time to act! So the complete reengineering of our power infrastructure would completely bankrupt our economy, likely taking the rest of the world with it -- what's your point?

Obama and McCain, while they may not have endorsed Gore's plan yet, seem all too happy to go the first step, which appears in the form of the EPA's Proposed Plan To Control Every Aspect Of Your Life. The Bush administration won't let that monstrosity move forward for now, but January 2009 is not far away.

Youth indoctrination Down Under: Planet Slayer

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's website is hosting an online game called Planet Slayer.

The villains are hypocritical meat-eating bourgeois materialist greenhouse pigs. The heroes are those who, in the words of Ludwig von Mises Institute essayist Ben O'Neill, "[oppose] logging, nuclear waste, war, consumerism, and other evils, and [support] such good things as composting, clean transport, solar power, and protesting."

The site has all sorts of fun activities for the kids, including a calculator apparently intended to show them that they've already contributed more than their share of CO2, and that they would do well to go some place quiet and kill themselves.

I wish I was kidding. Here's the screenshot for the opening page of the when-you-should-die calculator (click to view full-sized image):


This site is supported in part by the tax dollars of the citizens of Australia (via Film Victoria). Hope you feel like you're getting your money's worth, my Australian friends.

Flex Fuel(ishness): Eco-hostile Ethanol

If you own a vehicle that depends to any extent on ethanol to run, you may want to set your latte down before reading the following from a February 7 AP article:

The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming.

The researchers said that past studies showing the benefits of ethanol in combating climate change have not taken into account almost certain changes in land use worldwide if ethanol from corn — and in the future from other feedstocks such as switchgrass — become a prized commodity.

"Using good cropland to expand biofuels will probably exacerbate global warming," concludes the study published in Science magazine.

The researchers said that farmers under economic pressure to produce biofuels will increasingly "plow up more forest or grasslands," releasing much of the carbon formerly stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fires. Globally, more grasslands and forests will be converted to growing the crops to replace the loss of grains when U.S. farmers convert land to biofuels, the study said.

The rebuttal is pretty weak:

The Renewable Fuels Association, which represents ethanol producers, called the researchers' view of land-use changes "simplistic" and said the study "fails to put the issue in context."

"Assigning the blame for rainforest deforestation and grassland conversion to agriculture solely on the renewable fuels industry ignores key factors that play a greater role," said Bob Dinneen, the association's president.

Gotta love that ethanol. Touted as an earth-friendly alternative to petroleum, instead it brings us deforestation, rising food prices, food shortages (especially in third-world countries), and lots and lots of CO₂.


William Tucker writes in a February 13 American Spectator report that our country's current mentality regarding biofuels has roots going back more than 30 years:

From the beginning, the entire biofuels effort has been built on flimsy projections and dubious accounting that were seized upon by politicians eager to demonstrate they were "doing something" about energy. The whole fiasco can probably be traced to a single paragraph in Amory Lovins Soft Energy Paths, the 1976 book that inspired President Carter's embrace of "alternate energy" and convinced California Governor Jerry Brown that his state didn't need to build any more power plants. (Google "California Electrical Shortage" to see what happened there.) In one hasty brushstroke, Lovins outlined what a national biofuels industry might look like:

[E]xciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry, and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector. The required scale of organic conversion can be estimated. Each year the U.S. beer and wine industry, for example, microbiologically produces 5 percent as many gallons (not all alcohol, of course) as the U.S. oil industry produces gasoline. Gasoline has 1.5 to 2 times the fuel value of alcohol per gallon. Thus a conversion industry roughly ten to fourteen times the physical scale (in gallons of fluid output per year) of U.S. cellars and breweries, albeit using different processes, would produce roughly one-third of the present gasohol requirements of the United States....The scale of effort required does not seem unreasonable.

In other words, since beer and wine were already one-twentieth the volume of our gasoline, a reasonable expansion of distilleries could supply us with one-third of our transportation needs. Unfortunately, this analysis contained a single oversight that has bedeviled biofuels ever since.

Notice that while Lovins estimated the size of the distilling industry, he never mentions the amount of land required to produce the crops. Hops and vineyards currently occupy 40 million acres of farmland. Using Lovins' figure of "roughly ten to fourteen times the scale," that gives us 480 million acres -- more than all of U.S. cropland put together.

Lovins also made a mistake. Although he mentioned that beer and wine are "not all alcohol," he forgot to factor this into the final equation. Wine is 12 percent alcohol and beer is about 5 percent, so let's take 7 percent as an average. This means we must again multiply those 480 million acres by a factor of fourteen. That leaves us with 6.5 billion acres - three times the area of the United States, including Alaska -- in order to produce one-third of our transportation fuel needs in 1977. On this fatal error was the entire U.S. ethanol industry built.

Regardless of how we got here, the news that ethanol is likely doing more harm than good is not likely to lead any time soon to a rethinking of our energy policy.

The polar bear: poster child of the environmental left

Sen. Inhofe's EPW staff has gathered a variety of scientific sources indicating that polar bears, the majestic icon of the CoGW, are not declining -- in fact, they are now near record high levels (at least double their population of half a century ago). Many of these extinction scenarios are floated using a raft of scientifically unsound assumptions.

And yet, yesterday we read this in the Los Angeles Times:

The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming, and name its first potential victim: the polar bear.

The Interior Department may act as soon as this week on its year-old proposal to make the polar bear the first species to be listed as threatened with extinction because of melting ice due to a warming planet.

The environmental left candidly admits the importance of the polar bear as a cute, cuddly symbol of their cause:

Both sides agree that conservationists finally have the poster species they have sought to use the Endangered Species Act as a lever to force federal limits on the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and possibly to battle smokestack industry projects far from the Arctic.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "And then there is the polar bear."

Keep in mind that the decline isn't actually occurring right now. The movement to get the polar bear listed as threatened is based on what-if computer scenarios.


But what if the assumptions are wrong, and the projected warming does not occur? No matter. Once the polar bear is listed, environmental law can more easily be used as a bludgeon for The Cause. Just about any human activity can -- with appropriate logical gymnastics -- be tied to climate change, so pretty much no human activity in America would remain beyond the reach of the environmental regulators.

The Times article lists a more obvious example:

Heavy industry has reason to fear. At least one part of the environmental community believes the bear's listing would provide the leverage to stop a coal-fired power plant thousands of miles away from the Arctic.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who is known for his skepticism about global-warming measures, asked U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall last week whether listing the polar bear could be used to halt the construction of a new power plant in Oklahoma City.

"The Endangered Species Act is not the vehicle to reach out and demand all of the things that need to happen to address climate change," Hall said, to Inhofe's apparent satisfaction.

Andrew E. Wetzler, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's endangered species project, said Hall misunderstands the legal principles underlying the act, which was fortified by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide can be regulated as a pollutant.

If the builders of a coal-fired plant needed a federal permit, they would probably have to show how its emissions would not erode the polar bear's habitat or jeopardize its survival, Wetzler said.

If the drive to get the polar bear listed succeeds, the opportunity for environmentalist mischief will be boundless.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Carbon Dioxide is a Pollutant.

I don't know how long it's been going around, but I recently started noticing a new term being used to describe carbon dioxide emissions. Here's an example from a Baltimore Sun blog entry from today (emphasis added):

This may come as a surprise to some. An overwhelming number of Republicans in the recent South Carolina primary wanted action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, according to a report by the radio program Living on Earth.

Scientifically speaking, it's nonsense to describe carbon dioxide as a pollutant. As the news media and various public figures keep using the term so casually, though, many people with little science background will come to make the association without realizing it. Of course, pollution is bad -- we must do all we can to minimize it. And presto, public support for the AGW agenda.


UPDATE: More thoughts on the notion of CO₂ as a pollutant: With any other pollutant, you could take an air sample and distinguish pollutant particles from the remainder of the air sample. How do you do that with carbon dioxide? Further, if CO₂ is a pollutant, the earth's atmosphere has been polluted since before man first rubbed two sticks together.


UPDATE 2: I left a comment on the Baltimore Sun blog objecting to the use of the "greenhouse gas pollution" term. I was reminded in an e-mail reply that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that carbon dioxide is in fact a pollutant. The courts have spoken. If I had any sense, I would just shut up now. Being a "denier", though, I'll probably just come back and say (with raised eyebrow): If all you have to go on is a court ruling, I daresay the science behind such a claim is a bit shaky.


UPDATE 3: Reader Tigger23505 pointed me to this wonderful quote from Justice Scalia's dissent in Massachusetts v. EPA, the aforementioned USSC case. Responding to the logical gymnastics employed by the majority to allow the designation of carbon dioxide as an air pollutant, Scalia remarked:

It follows that everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an 'air pollutant'. This reading of the statute defies common sense.

Quite.

Hydroelectric dams cause earthquakes, volcanoes, severe thunderstorms, and heart attacks

Okay, try to follow along on this one.

Again we return to the observation that the AGW 'crisis' is ideally suited to the aims of the radical environmental movement. Global warming (or "climate change", if you insist) is flexible enough to encompass virtually all of their pet causes of the past four decades (with the exception of nuclear power, which keeps stubbornly popping up as the most earth-friendly energy source capable of completely replacing coal).

For example, the enviros have long opposed the damming of rivers because of the inconvenience such projects cause to snail darters and the like. They have not, however, been able to swing public support in their favor, because on the whole people like their televisions and their power tools more than they like snail darters.

That's why the AGW thing is a stroke of good luck for the environmentalists. Like just about everything else, someone has been able to suggest a connection between the damming of rivers and global warming. A September 4 article in Australia's news.com reported:

International Rivers Network executive director Patrick McCully today told Brisbane's Riversymposium rotting vegetation and fish found in dams produced surprising amounts of methane - 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

"Often it's accepted that hydropower is a climate friendly technology but in fact probably all reservoirs around the world emit greenhouse gases and some of them, especially some of the ones in the tropics, emit very high quantities of greenhouse gases even comparable to, in some cases even much worse than, fossil fuels like coal and gas," Mr McCully said.

He said when water flow was stopped, vegetation and soil in the flooded area and from upstream was left to rot, as well as fish and other animals which died in the dam.

They then released carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the air.

"Basically they're factories for converting carbon into methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas - it's less known than carbon dioxide but it's actually about 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere."

Mr McCully said global estimates blamed dams for about a third of all methane emissions worldwide.

Now we're on to something. Dams cause global warming. That's just evil.

Still no groundswell of public opposition to dams.... So, let's bring this a bit closer to home. We've mentioned some of the things said to be caused by or enhanced by AGW (such as flooding rains, amorous cats, genocide, super poison ivy, higher pizza prices, and megacryometeors). To this list we must add earthquakes and volcanoes, as we are told in this August 30 LiveScience article:

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says.

The impact of human-induced global warming on Earth's ice and oceans is already noticeable: Greenland's glaciers are melting at an increasing rate, and sea level rose by a little more than half a foot (0.17 meters) globally in the 20th century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

[...]

One particular feature that can change the balance of forces in Earth's crust is ice, in the form of glaciers and ice sheets that cover much of the area around Earth's poles plus mountains at all latitudes. The weight of ice depresses the crust on which it sits.

As the ice melts, the crust below no longer has anything sitting on top of it, and so can rebound fairly rapidly (by geological standards). (This rebounding is actually occurring now as a result of the end of the last Ice Age: The retreat of massive ice sheets from the northern United States and Canada has allowed the crust in these areas to bounce back.)

Areas of rebounding crust could change the stresses acting on earthquake faults and volcanoes in the crust.

(Thanks to Newsbusters)

Earthquakes and volcanoes are bad. But you're still okay with hydroelectric power, are you? Willing to play the odds that a volcano won't pop up in your back yard, eh? Let's up the ante a little more. Here's another August 30 article from LiveScience:

Global warming will make severe thunderstorms and tornadoes a more common feature of U.S. weather, NASA scientists said today.

Climate models have previously shown that Earth will see more heavy rainstorms as the atmosphere warms, but a new climate model developed by NASA researchers is the first to show the difference in strength between storms that occur over land and those over the ocean and how storms strengths will change in general.

The models don't directly simulate thunderstorms and lightning, but look for conditions that are ripe for severe storms to form.

Thunderstorms! Tornadoes! Those are real threats where I live. In fact, as I mentioned in the post before this, my PC was zapped by lightning three weeks ago. I was at work at the time, and I heard a single thunderclap -- apparently the one that got my motherboard at home. A thunderstorm with only one significant lightning strike, but it was a doozy. That's just creepy enough to blame on global warming (never mind the fact that we're experiencing the coolest summer in the 30 years I've lived in Texas). But is it enough to make me give up the hydroelectric dam? Hey, I need power to run my PC once I get it fixed (as well as the new one I have on order).

Since you haven't listened to reason yet, it's time to get personal. Global warming is coming for you. Yes, you. Here's an Associated Press dispatch from September 5:

Doctors warn that the warmer weather expected with climate change might also produce more heart problems.

"If it really is a few degrees warmer in the next 50 years, we could definitely have more cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Karin Schenck-Gustafsson, of the department of cardiology at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.

[...] In higher temperatures, we sweat to get rid of heat. During that process, blood is sent to the skin where temperatures are cooler, which opens up the blood vessels. In turn, the heart rate rises and blood pressure drops. That combination can be dangerous for older people and those with weakened cardiovascular systems.

So now you're dead. If that doesn't turn you against hydroelectric dams, I don't know what will.

President Bush knows how to play The Game as well, it appears

The Washington Post reports today that President Bush is calling on major industrialized and developing countries to attend a "climate change summit" in September.

"In recent years, science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it," Bush said in his invitation letter Friday, asking other nations to take part in discussing a long-term strategy for reducing greenhouse emissions.

Under international pressure to take tough action against global warming, Bush last May had called for a meeting of nations to talk about how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and promote energy efficiency without hampering economic growth.

While the president appears to be conceding the basic arguments of the AGW alarmists, it is not clear that he is expecting to participate in any binding agreement that would harm the U.S. economically. Indeed, by his rhetoric, he seems to be setting things up so that no binding agreement will be made at all:

Bush wants to bring India, China and other fast-growing countries to the negotiating table so they are part of the solution, not the problem.

Given that China has already announced its refusal to submit to any binding agreements, it would appear that this summit is better seen as a strategic ploy to shift political pressure off of America and onto countries like China.

Is AGW causing the Himalayan glaciers to melt?

There is no doubt that many of the Himilayan glaciers are receding. The alarmists are quick to point to this as proof that human-produced CO₂ emissions are warming the planet. A new study, though, indicates that while the alarmists got the "human-produced" part right, the actual culprit in the melting of Asian glaciers is good old-fashioned smog (The Times (UK), August 3):

They call it the Asian Brown Cloud. Anyone who has flown over South Asia has seen it – a vast blanket of smog that covers much of the region.

It is also what colours those sunsets at the Taj Mahal. Now a group of scientists has carried out the first detailed study of the phenomenon and arrived at a troubling conclusion.

They say that it is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt, with potentially devastating consequences for more than two billion people in India, China, Bangladesh and other downstream countries.

In a study published yesterday by Nature, the British journal, they say that black soot particles in the cloud are absorbing the Sun’s heat and pushing up temperatures at the same altitude as most Himalayan glaciers.

Scientists have already observed that two thirds of the 46,000 glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking, leading to increasingly severe floods downstream and, eventually, to widespread drought. Greenhouse gases were previously thought to be the main cause of the problem, which threatens the sources of Asia’s nine main rivers – including the Indus, the Ganges and the Yangtze.

But the research team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California says that the Asian Brown Cloud – made up of gases and suspended particles known as aerosols – is just as much to blame. “My one hope is that this finding will intensify the focus of Asian scientists and policy makers on the glacier issue,” Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the research, told The Times. “These glaciers are the source for major river systems, so at least two billion people are directly involved in this.”

PB&J: The edible carbon offset

Ordinarily, I pay no attention to the efforts by vegetarian and vegan food scolds (such as PETA and CSPI) to get me to forswear meat. However, Bernard Brown's campaign to get people to switch from meat to peanut butter and jelly is attractive enough that I might go along for the ride (for at least one meal, anyway). Although I disagree with Brown's no-meat philosophy, I commend him for presenting his case in a winsome fashion, unlike the aforementioned scolds.

Brown is diligent to remind us that by eating a PB&J sandwich instead of a deli sandwich, we're not only helping to save the life of an animal, we're also helping to save the planet:

A PB&J will slow global warming.

Next time you have one you'll reduce your carbon footprint by saving the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets.

That's about forty percent of what you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

If you were going to have a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you save the equivalent almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

So does this mean I can count my PB&J sandwich as a carbon offset?

Speaking of rash conclusions...

In my post on the poison ivy study I criticized the researchers for drawing unjustified Real World conclusions based on what amounted to a lab simulation. I thought they should have at least gone out to see if poison ivy -- or any other plant, for that matter -- has shown any sign of biologically adapting to rising CO₂ concentrations. Otherwise, all we have is what-if alarmism, on a par with a B-grade science fiction movie (like what we saw in The Day After Tomorrow).

In fairness, I need to admit that some researchers do try to come a little closer to Real World experimentation when speculating on the effects of rising CO₂.

A reader on Free Republic brought to my attention a study conducted by the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts that actually went through the trouble of conducting its simulation outside (in a North Carolina forest owned by Duke University). As summarized by Nature.com, May 30, 2006:

In the study, Mohan and her co-workers pumped extra CO₂ over three large circular plots of North Carolina pine forest. For six years, the plants inside were exposed to an extra 200 parts per million of CO₂ over today's atmospheric concentration of about 380 parts per million, roughly what we might expect from pollution by the middle of this century.

Other research has suggested that vines tend to grow particularly fast in response to higher CO₂ levels, and that vines are increasing in abundance all over the planet. Unlike trees, which use extra carbon to grow more wood, vines use it to produce more leaves. The extra leaves help the plant to harvest even more CO₂, the cycle continues and the vines flourish.

Mohan's experiment sought to check whether the plants shoot up in the wild, as they do in greenhouse experiments. "Yes, dramatically," was the answer. The poisonous ivies grew at double the rate of plants grown under regular CO₂ levels, whereas woody species on average tend to grow around 31% faster. The elevated CO₂ also created a nastier version of urushiol poison, the team showed.

[...] By extracting urushiol from the plant's leaves, the researchers found that poison ivy grown in high CO₂ churned out more than 150% more of one nasty, unsaturated form of urushiol and around 60% less of the mild, saturated form.

The researchers aren't sure why this chemical shift took place, but one idea is that the increased availability of carbon somehow favours the chemical reactions that produce the unsaturated forms of urushiol.

I think this team did a much better job of trying to approximate natural conditions than did the team in the other study. But... two thoughts come to my mind pretty quickly:

1. The study was premised on the IPCC guesstimate that atmospheric CO₂ would rise from the current 380-ish ppm to 570-ish ppm by mid-century. As much of IPCC's work has given me reason for skepticism, I decline to swallow this prediction uncritically.
2. The planet's ecosystem is so complex, I don't think a study performed in this manner can authoritatively tell us what would happen in the Real World if atmospheric CO₂ did rise to this level.
   

I'm open to being educated on this, if you care to give it a whirl.

Poison ivy study leads to rash conclusions

Tara Parker-Pope, writing today in the Wall Street Journal, leads off with an ominous pronouncement:

Poison ivy, the scourge of summer campers, hikers and gardeners, is getting worse.

New research shows the rash-inducing plant appears to be growing faster and producing more potent oil compared with earlier decades.

There's a word in the second sentence that should set off alarm bells, but let's set that aside for a moment and move along to the fingering of the culprit.

The reason? Rising ambient carbon-dioxide levels create ideal conditions for the plant, producing bigger leaves, faster growth, hardier plants and oil that's even more irritating.

Our old friend CO₂! It is indeed a fact that CO₂ levels have generally increased over the past century or two, and we know that plants love the stuff. The conclusion should be foregone.

So what did these researchers do? Did they send teams of scientists into the forests of America, collecting samples of increasingly aggressive poison ivy? No, of course not, silly! Climate researchers can form their conclusions based on computer simulations, so why should plant researchers have to go out into the field and actually observe the phenomenon their research purports to demonstrate?

No, what they did was gas a bunch of plants in a lab to see what would happen, and then used the results to assume what was happening in nature.

Although the data on poison ivy come from controlled studies, they suggest the vexing plant is more ubiquitous than ever.

The plant appears to be growing faster. The data suggest the plant is more ubiquitous. Unless I missed it, there's nothing in the article to indicate that the researchers have found a CO₂-enhanced poison ivy plant in the Real World.

So why are they insulting us with the headline, Climate Changes Are Making Poison Ivy More Potent? Because AGW alarmism is not actually about science.

UPDATE: Here's a followup.

Why ice core samples are an unreliable proxy for CO2 measurements

An earlier post examined the AGW alarmists' abuse of CO₂ data to falsely assert a steady increase in atmospheric concentrations of the gas in the past two centuries. They supposedly validated their conclusions through the analysis of ice core data.

The problem with the use of ice cores as a proxy for CO₂ measurements is that the ice is unavoidably contaminated by liquid water. Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection (CLOR) in Warsaw, Poland, in written testimony submitted to a U.S. Senate committee in March 2004 said:

Determinations of CO₂ in polar ice cores are commonly used for estimations of the pre-industrial CO₂ atmospheric levels. Perusal of these determinations convinced me that glaciological studies are not able to provide a reliable reconstruction of CO₂ concentrations in the ancient atmosphere. This is because the ice cores do not fulfill the essential closed system criteria. One of them is a lack of liquid water in ice, which could dramatically change the chemical composition the air bubbles trapped between the ice crystals. This criterion, is not met, as even the coldest Antarctic ice (down to -73°C) contains liquid water. More than 20 physico-chemical processes, mostly related to the presence of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original chemical composition of the air inclusions in polar ice.

More lying with statistics -- Is today's atmospheric CO2 level unusual?

Has the average CO₂ level been rising steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?

No, according to Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris, writing May 14 in the Canada Free Press. If you wish to lie using statistics, rule number one is: Choose your data points carefully.

While Antarctic ice core records supposedly 'prove' a significant increase in CO₂ in this period, there are serious problems with this data. Besides the fact that ice bubbles take about 80 years to form and so cannot give a single year accurate measure, the continual freezing, refreezing and pressurization of ice columns may greatly alter the original composition of the air trapped in the bubbles. Nevertheless, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many others have accepted as meaningful the ice core results that indicate a pre-industrial CO₂ level of 280 parts per million (ppm), in comparison with today's 385 ppm.

The most accurate way to determine the atmosphere's average CO₂ content is to simply conduct a direct chemical analysis at many different places and times. Fortunately, there are more than 90,000 direct measurements by chemical methods between 1857 and 1957. However, in what appears to be a case of 'cherry-picking' data to fit a pre-determined conclusion, only the lower level CO₂ data were included when the pre-industrial average was calculated (see below graph where data used in the averaging is highlighted). This is the average that was used to supposedly 'validate' the long term ice core records on which Al Gore and others depend.

[...] In a new scientific paper in the journal Energy and Environment, German researcher Ernst-Georg Beck, shows that the pre-industrial level is some 50 ppm higher than the level used by computer models that produce all future climate predictions. Completely at odds with the smoothly increasing levels found in the ice core records, Beck concludes, "Since 1812, the CO₂ concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated, exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942, the latter showing more than 400 ppm."

In a paper submitted to US Senate Committee hearings, Polish Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, a veteran mountaineer who has excavated ice from 17 glaciers on six continents, stated bluntly, "The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic [human] causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO₂ in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false."

The CO₂ claim appears to be another con from our friends who fooled so many with the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph (which purported to show a recent spike after centuries of stable temperatures).

As the authors note, the reason claims like this are accepted without question is that questions are not allowed. Nevertheless, scientists who love truth more than research grants should make sure their voices are heard.

Graph source