The release of a major IPCC report is, generally, cause for deniers to set out a veritable buffet of craziness. However, last week’s release of an IPCC report on climate, land use and agriculture was a much more limited affair for deniers. They struggled to respond to the report’s description of agriculture as a cause of climate change, victim of its wild weather impacts, and potential champion of solutions.
Their biggest get was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Bjorn Lomborg, in which he reheats the argument he made in the NY Post a couple weeks ago to argue that people don’t need to stop eating meat, but instead we should invest in agricultural R&D. Weirdly, the report does actually pretty much say that. So while there are PLENTY of details in Lomborg’s piece that are wacky, in this case, he’s not entirely wrong.
Similarly, over at WUWT, there were three posts dealing with the report. One is from the GWPF, which is in turn a clipping of a story from AgriLand, that talks about how some UK farmers have taken issue with media that portrayed the report as calling for an end to meat eating. Which, again, it isn’t, so they have a point.
A second WUWT entry is also reproduced from elsewhere, this time from Judith Curry’s blog. In the post she points to one of our favorite pieces (Rob Meyer’s take at the Atlantic) and offers a few banal comments of her own. Not exactly a stinging rebuke!
Finally, the one original piece about the report at WUWT, a guest post by Eric Worrall, is also the only to really try and rebuke the report’s claim that climate is a threat to agriculture. The rhetorical thrust of Worrall’s post is that while the IPCC claims climate change is bad for agriculture, satellites show the world is greening, so what are we worried about?
Obviously, Worrall makes no attempt to get into the specifics of that greening, and whether or not growing some vegetation on marginal or formerly desert land is at all helpful for hungry people whose crops are going to be hit even harder by increased carbon pollution.
Fortunately, there are real journalists out there, and one of them did dig into that claim! Over at HuffPost, Chris D’Angelo covered how the report “puts a dagger through” the denial myth that more carbon dioxide is good for the planet. Even though carbon dioxide can help plants grow in controlled environments, in the real world we’re finding that not only is climate change hurting agriculture, but the crops themselves are getting less nutritious as CO2 levels rise.
So it seems this climate and agriculture report is no doubt leaving a bad taste in denier’s mouths.
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