Free Republic

Dr. Patrick Moore sent me this last week, and after reading it, I agree with him in his initial note to me that This is probably the most important paper I will ever write. Moore looks at the historical record of CO2 in our atmosphere and concludes that we came dangerously close to losing plant life on Earth about 18,000 years ago, when CO2 levels approached 150 ppm, below which plant life can’t sustain photosynthesis. He notes: A 140 million year decline in CO2 to levels that came close to threatening the survival of life on Earth can hardly be...

resident Obama will attend a United Nations climate summit in New York this week where he will try to gather support for an international agreement to curb emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which he labels as carbon pollution. This could not be further from the truth. Talk with most any biologist or botanist and you will find an opposite perspective, one in which CO2 is the elixir of life. We all learned in primary school that atmospheric CO2 is the building block of plant life, the primary raw material that they utilize during the process of photosynthesis. As demonstrated in...

Enlarge ImageThe good girth. Researchers measure the continuing growth--and carbon storage--of rainforest trees. Credit: Simon Lewis Some good news for those worried about climate change: The trees in African rainforests are gobbling up ever more carbon dioxide and thereby mitigating the buildup of the greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere. The finding underscores the importance of protecting the rainforests, say the authors. Trees take in CO2 as they grow, and when they die, their decay releases it back into the air. In theory, these fluxes are balanced in a mature forest, so the trees are neither a net sink--as the...

Published: at 12:34 PM BERKELEY, Calif., March 25 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists are challenging a theory that assumes most iron needed to fertilize plankton blooms comes nearly entirely from wind-blown dust. Phoebe Lam of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and James Bishop of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown the key source of iron in the Western North Pacific is not dust, but the volcanic continental margins of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands. Understanding the origins, transport mechanisms and fate of naturally occurring iron in high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll surface waters is important in calculating...

Scientists Close In On Missing Carbon Sink Science Daily — Forests in the United States and other northern mid- and upper-latitude regions are playing a smaller role in offsetting global warming than previously thought, according to a study appearing in Science this week. The study, which sheds light on the so-called missing carbon sink, concludes that intact tropical forests are removing an unexpectedly high proportion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, partially offsetting carbon entering the air through industrial emissions and deforestation. To study the global carbon cycle, Stephens and his colleagues analyzed air samples that had been collected by...

The three evidences of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the apparent contemporary atmospheric CO2 increase is anthropogenic, is discussed and rejected: CO2 measurements from ice cores; CO2 measurements in air; and carbon isotope data in conjunction with carbon cycle modelling. It is shown why the ice core method and its results must be rejected; and that current air CO2 measurements are not validated and their results subjectively “edited”. Further it is shown that carbon cycle modelling based on non-equilibrium models, remote from observed reality and chemical laws, made to fit non-representative data through the use...