A piece one would have expected to see in the Onion was published yesterday by the Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal extolling the wonderful improvements to our quality of life that altering our planet's climate for us to look forward to.
Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer: In Defense of Carbon Dioxide
The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature.
By HARRISON H. SCHMITT AND WILLIAM HAPPER
Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.
The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn't the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.
While these authors are actually scientists with backgrounds in engineering and physics their piece is about as far from sound science as as they could conceivably get. They claim that some types of plants will be able to capture the more plentiful CO2 more efficiently needing less water to do it, and that will be a boon to mankind.
Crop yields in recent dry years were less affected by drought than crops of the dust-bowl droughts of the 1930s, when there was less carbon dioxide. Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it's a wonder that humanitarians aren't clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, some are denouncing it.
We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth's atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.
Their derisive dismissal of the vast majority of scientists as "pure belief" is astounding in its level of arrogance.
Phil Plait writes in Slate that this Schmitt and Happer piece deserves some sort of bobbie prize for junk climate science:
No Need to Worry About Global Warming, Folks: More Carbon Dioxide Will Be Awesome
By Phil Plait
After reading dozens, hundreds, of such mind-numbing articles, I think we’ve found a winner. One that is so sweepingly wrong and based on such a ridiculous premise that it’s weapons-grade denial. Unsurprisingly, it was published in the Wall Street Journal, which has a lengthy history of printing reality-free OpEds about climate change.
I agree with Plait this preposterous puff piece takes the cake. But hey its the WSJ!