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Emotions are running high in Australia. One anonymous commenter has posted over 400 comments here, if he repeats himself, either ignore it, or explain why he’s wrong. Links are appreciated in comments but not ones that don’t even have one line of explanation (eg youtube). We welcome all honest debate from all comers.
CSIRO wants to stop methane emissions: but can they get a grant to stop El Nino’s and cap volcanoes?
This type of trans-Siberian cow used to emit a lot of methane.
Tom Quirk sent me a short note to point out that the big rise in global methane almost certainly was man-made — at least up to the mid 1980’s, but in the last 20 years, the culprit for rising methane appears to be volcanoes and El Ninos. (Note the timing of the spikes in the graph below, as methane pours into the atmosphere some years, but barely changes in most other recent years).
Apparently, the man-made emissions in the 70s and 80s were largely due to leaky pipes in the Soviet Union. Natural gas was dirt cheap up til the mid 1970’s. It was so cheap the Russians didn’t bother to plug those flawed pipes. But as prices rose (and after a big nasty explosion in 1982*) they got serious, fixed the pipes and stopped a lot of the out-gassing.
There are many graphs of atmospheric methane levels showing ominous unnatural rises, but the driving forces become so much clearer if we look closely at the annual change in methane levels. — Jo
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The true story of the drivers of methane
Guest Post: Tom Quirk
Methane is a greenhouse gas associated with grazing animals and decaying plant material in swamps and marshes. It has been claimed as a factor contributing to global warming because of an alleged warming effect that is assumed by the IPCC to be 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. However, when calculated correctly[i] on the basis of atomic weight, the actual multiplier is only 7 and, moreover , the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is about 200 times less that that of CO2. Methane in the atmosphere is broken down to CO2 and water over a period averaging some 12 years.
The CO2-equivalent contribution of methane from grazing animals is estimated by various Australian government agencies to be 5 to 10% of national emissions of greenhouse gases. However, these estimates also show no increase in methane from agricultural emissions over the last 20 years.
Recent research shows that the increase in atmospheric methane levels since about 1940 can be explained by the dramatic increase in natural gas (fossil methane) use and leakage from badly managed transmission and distribution systems in the Northern Hemisphere[ii]. With the improvement of these systems leakage has been reduced and there has only been a slight methane increase since 1990 – the level has in fact varied with El Ninos and La Ninas (Figure 2) and methane from grazing animals has not made a measureable contribution.
This graph shows how much methane changes year by year over the last 1,000 years:
Figure 1: Annual changes in atmospheric methane in parts per billion derived from ice core up to 1990 1990 and direct atmospheric measurements from 1983 to 2011 AD [iii]. Data source CSIRO [iv].
The next graph shows those same annual changes during just the last century:
Figure 2: Annual changes in atmospheric methane in parts per billion derived from direct atmospheric measurements from 1983 to 2011 AD. The annual increase in atmospheric methane from 2000 to 2011 is 2.5 ppb/year, about the rate at the end of the nineteenth century.The peaks in the direct atmospheric measurements reflect the influence of El Ninos. The peak in 1991 is an indirect effect from the eruption at Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991 and the 1998, 2007 and 2010 El Nino’s are marked by dashed lines. Data source CSIRO [iii]
Willie Soon has some fun with the sea-level debate, going back to William the Conqueror, and landmarks in England.
Are sea-levels “accelerating”? Can the satellites resolve sea-level to 1mm changes a year? Why is the raw data so different?
I think the strongest point is the one Nils Axel Morner has made about the extraordinary adjustments in the raw satellite data, which Willie Soon refers too soon after the 20 minute mark.
Willie is always a rapid fire presenter, getting a good response from the audience…
I’d like to know more about Pevensey Castle (7 mins). It was built in 300AD or so, and at the time was a Roman Fort. The sea surrounded it on three sides, now it is 1.5km from the sea. William the Conqueror landed there (or close to it) in 1066. Apparently the water was so high, they used to toss prisoners over the wall and the tide would take their bodies away. Now it is high and dry. Apparently the marshes around the castle have also been actively reclaimed as the land was so valuable. Obviously there are several factors at work. [Google images show how far the sea is now.]
Hydroelectricity is the only renewable that produces any meaningful amounts of energy on a global scale (about 16% of all electricity, compared to the paltry cumulative total from all other renewables of less than 3.5%). Oh the dilemma, hydropower turns out to release more methane than people realized. New research suggests dams are the main source of methane from rivers, and they could potentially lift global freshwater emissions by 7%.
There are 50,000 large dams around the world, but many, many more smaller ones.
Maeck’s team decided to take a look at methane releases from the water impoundments behind smaller dams that store water less than 50 feet deep.
They describe analysis of methane release from water impounded behind six small dams on a European river. “Our results suggest that sedimentation-driven methane emissions from dammed river hot spot sites can potentially increase global freshwater emissions by up to 7 percent,” said the report. It noted that such emissions are likely to increase due to a boom in dam construction fostered by the quest for new energy sources and water shortages.
THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream.
A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At the end of a free trade, both parties have something they prefer.
[Those who know what real free markets are know that an emissions trading scheme is not and never can be a free market. The “Carbon-Market” is a market with no commodity, no demand, and no supply. Who needs a “carbon credit”? The government entirely determines both supply and demand.]
A carbon market is a forced market. There is little intrinsic incentive to buy a certificate for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It says a lot about the voluntary value of a carbon credit that when given the option to pay $2 to offset their flight emissions, 88% of people choose not to. A few do it as a form of green penance to assuage guilt, and others do it for their eco public relations campaign or branding.
To create demand for emissions permits, the government threatens onerous fines to force people to buy a product they otherwise don’t need and most of the time would never even have thought of acquiring. Likewise, supply wouldn’t exist without government approved agents. Potentially a company could sell fake credits (cheaper than the real ones) and what buyer could spot the difference? Indeed, in terms of penance or eco-branding, fake credits, as long as they were not audited, would “work” just as well as real ones.
Despite being called a commodity market, there is no commodity: the end result is air that belongs to no-one-in-particular that has slightly-less-of-a-trace-gas. Sometimes it is not even air with slightly less CO2 in it, it is merely air that might-have-had–more-CO2, but doesn’t. It depends on the unknowable intentions of factory owners in distant lands.
How strange, then, that this non-commodity was at one time projected to become the largest tradable commodity in the world – bigger even than the global market for oil. In 2009, Bart Chilton, chairman of energy markets at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, estimated global carbon markets would be worth $2 trillion within five years.
The UN may claim that carbon is “tracked and traded like any other commodity”, but if I buy a tonne of tin, I either get a tonne of tin or I get $20,000 because I onsold it — someone, somewhere gets the goods. If a bulk shipment of coal arrives empty, buyers notice. Fraud is easy to spot.
Unfortunately, fraud has been a big, ongoing problem with emissions trading. This market needs auditors, and the auditors need auditing (the top two auditors in the EU emissions trading scheme were both suspended in 2009 for irregularities). The EU has already lost €5bn to carbon-trading VAT fraud. The mafia are laundering money in Italy through renewables schemes, and after one tax loophole was closed, market volume in Belgium dropped by 90%.
The carbon market also depends on the honesty of people claiming: “We wouldn’t have built that dam without that carbon credit.” How would we know? The Xiaoxi dam in China was already under construction two years before the owners applied for credits “to build it”.
Since an ETS exists by government fiat and has no intrinsic value without it, it is technically a fiat currency rather than a tradeable commodity. Supply and demand is set by bureaucrats in the EU. If the price is too high, politicians will issue more credits, and if it’s too low they will delay them (as the EU is planning to do). Bureaucrats can also give exemptions to trade-affected industries (or their friends, and to their fans in marginal seats).
Those who say that a carbon market is “like” other derivatives markets are wrong. Derivatives markets are sometimes quite disconnected from actual products such as pork bellies or gold bars, but eventually the supply and demand for real goods will determine the price. In some places the size of the derivatives market exceeds that of the commodity market, but that’s a reason to question those schemes, not to set up a market in an atmospheric nullity or something as frivolous as an “intention” not to build a dam.
So, who profits from the carbon market? The brokers in a carbon market – like large financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, UBS, Morgan Stanley, CBA, Citi, HSBC, Macquarie, – make money on every trade. The global carbon market turned over $176bn in 2011. These groups have been lobbying for a market, not a tax, and the reasons are obvious.
Most of the key factors in a carbon market are misnamed. The market is not free. An essential plant fertiliser is called pollution. The aim of the market is not to make clean energy but to change global temperatures by an amount that rounded to the nearest degree, equals zero*. The US has no market but has reduced emissions (largely thanks to shale gas), while any reductions in EU emissions were largely due to falling GDP. Yet the government wants to join the EU scheme.
Ironically, the reason for having any carbon scheme at all comes from monopolistic research. There are virtually no grants specifically available for sceptical scientists, but funding galore for unsceptical ones.
We need a free market in science before we even discuss the need for a free market in carbon.
[The people who demand a free market in CO2 apparently don’t give a toss about the lack of one in scientific research. Who amongst the carbon market lobbyists and politicians argues that we ought to be funding skeptical scientists? To get a fair hearing in a court, we know we have to fund both sides. Monopolies don’t work in business, and they don’t work in science either. May the best researcher win!]
But don’t hold your breath – the global warmers prove to be mostly global hypocrites.
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Reproduced with permission (though it retains a few edits and phrasings that didn’t fit in the final copy see [..]).
Here’s a graph showing something about Australian, Chinese and Indian emissions (thanks to Tom Quirk). At a glance you might think we are up there with the best of them (doing our bit to fertilize the flora of the planet, and to regreen the deserts). Alas, the Australian tally (the green triangles) represents the total emissions of Australia. The lines depicting Chinese and Indian emissions just show their annual increases.
Chinese annual increases in emissions are larger than the entire Australian output. India is not too far behind.
UPDATE: TonyfromOz points out the Y-axis scale is missing three zero’s. Data source: CDIAC (Thanks Anton).
It appears the new coal fired power stations and cars coming on line in the breakneck-evolution-of-China produced twice the emissions of the entire continent of Australia.
Remember our aim to reduce our national output by 5% or so by 2020. Thanks to the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Fund, the Remote Indigenous Energy Program, the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program, the Living Greener program, the Regional Natural Resource Management Planning, the Light Vehicle CO2 Emissions Standards, the Household Assistance Package, and not to mention another 36 programs I could have listed as well as the Emissions Trading Scheme (aka Carbon Tax), or the Climate Commission, and a multitude of state based schemes, the Australian citizens will spend billions to reduce that string of green triangles by an amount less than the error bars on a graph of Chinese emissions.*
Roughly speaking (and there’s not much point in being accurate), a 5% reduction in Australian emissions undoes the effect of one week of development in China.
Ask not the value for money you receive. Rest assured that by spending this money Australians are ensuring jobs for Chinese factory workers (albeit possibly in sweatshop conditions) and Australian bureaucrats (who bid against each other for Canberra real estate). We are making sure that if competitive solar energy is possible, someone somewhere will find that and then charge us royalties to buy those products back off them.
This is your brain on big-government funding.
Alas it is not your bank balance.
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*You have to imagine the error bars on this graph. This is Chinese data after all. Look at the noise. There ought to be error bars on the error bars.
When the same model code with the same data is run in a different computing environment (hardware, operating system, compiler, libraries, optimizer), the results can differ significantly. So even if reviewers or critics obtained a climate model, they could not replicate the results without knowing exactly what computing environment the model was originally run in.
This raises that telling question: What kind of planet do we live on? Do we have a Intel Earth or an IBM one? It matters. They get different weather, apparently.
There is a chaotic element (or two) involved, and the famous random butterfly effect on the planet’s surface is also mirrored in the way the code is handled. There is a binary butterfly effect. But don’t for a moment think that this “mirroring” is useful: these are different butterflies, and two random events don’t produce order, they produce chaos squared.
How important are these numerical discrepancies? Obviously it undermines our confidence in climate models even further. We can never be sure how much of the rising temperature in a model forecasts might change if we moved to a different computer. (Though, since we already know the models are using the wrong assumptions about relative humidity, and are proven wrong, missing hot-spot an’ all, this is like adding sour cream to a moldy cake. We were never going to eat it anyway).
This is what 90% certain looks like.
The cheapest way to lower global climate sensitivity might be to switch operating systems in climate lab computers.
The monster complexity of climate models means they never had a chance of actually solving the climate in the foreseeable future, but that makes them ideal to issue unverifiable pronouncements from The Mount. At the same time it cultivates the endless grant-getting-cash-cow, always in need of bigger computer arrays: more code, more conferences, more computers!
In a nutshell, this new study adds numbers and detail to a home truth that the grown ups in the room know already. Basically humans want cheap energy. The free market, powered by human creativity and mass demand, will always find ways to circumvent national policies that try to force people to use more expensive energy.
In the absence of a global ruler (Copenhagen anyone?), the only way to reduce fossil fuel use is to invent or discover a better energy source. Any other national policy is simply pushing rocks uphill, like poor old Sisyphus. Manufacturing will always move to countries where cheap energy is still available.
Researchers Andrew, Davis and Peters conclude that national climate and “carbon” policies are becoming less effective every year
Global trade in energy intensive goods is growing faster than global trade in carbon credits. So as some countries slow production and reduce their emissions, they are simply buying those goods instead from other countries. The energy is still used to make the goods, but it’s done in countries that have less regulation on carbon emissions.
The figure 1 graph below is one of the most information dense graphs around. It’s a story of global geostrategic transformation (click to enlarge). It shows which countries are the largest extractors, producers, and consumers of fossil fuels, and whether they use it domestically or provide it for export. The US was the largest source of fossil fuels (bigger than China and the middle East) but since 2004 has shrunk to be smaller than both. It was the largest “producer” in 2007 but China was catching up so fast that I suspect it will lose the top dog status there too. The US is still the largest consumer and half of that consumption is now imported. Australia is so insignificant it scores a couple of reddish bars in “extraction”, but does not even rate a mention for production or consumption.
Figure 1: (Click to enlarge) Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, 1997–2007, allocated to each of the three accounting points: (a) extraction (highlighting emissions embodied in domestic consumption and those consumed elsewhere), (b) combustion (highlighting whether the fuel was extracted domestically or elsewhere), and (c) consumption (also highlighting whether the fuel was extracted domestically or elsewhere). Countries in the EU27 are grouped.
Nothing succeeds in flagrant waste quite like Big-Government.
Following in Soviet footsteps with gusto, politicians of all persuasions manage business failure on a grand scale. Did you miss yet another case-study on 7:30 report from last week (see the segment there)?
A mass of taxpayer-funded forests designed to make Australia self sufficient in plantation timber and paper are now being burned by land owners as the companies running the schemes collapse amid allegations of rorting, fraud and mismanagement.
The Howard government made plantations a tax deductable investment, and then the Rudd and Gillard governments made it even worse — broadening the rules in 2008 to include trees for “carbon sequestration” (which perversely could still be logged). Lo and behold, two and a half million acres of taxpayer funded forests were planted. What could possibly go wrong? Just a few things:
1. The bottom fell out of the timber market. There is no demand for the wood and the trees are not worth harvesting, so the forests are being burnt and the land reclaimed for other purposes.
2. Whole districts of farming communities were upended by the artificial boom and bust, as farmers sold their properties to the plantations, which are now largely broke, collapsed, and mired in legal trouble.
KAREN STEPHENS: Now, you can imagine how you just take 70, 80 jobs out of a community overnight. Nobody came running to us to say, “Can we help Casterton?”
3. As a nation Australia lost the useful products that could have been created from that land. The nation also lost the taxes that would have accrued, both from the investors who avoided paying tax and from the lost opportunities of businesses which might have done something useful with the capital, the land, and the workers.
For example, if all industrialized nations achieve a 100% reduction (that is, stop using coal, oil, gas, diesel, and avgas tomorrow*), then 87 years from now the world will be 0.352C cooler (assuming climate sensitivity is a high 4.5C and the models work, and nothing else changes in the atmosphere).
The great thing is you can adjust the parameters yourself to see how many ways Global Action does not add up.
Calculator from CATO.org (Click to go to the calculator)
Unfortunately it does not also project the costs. Version II perhaps?
*Please forgive me for that sweeping assumption. We all know that to get a true 100% reduction in CO2 emissions we’d need to do a lot more. Like building nuclear plants from handmade mud-bricks using solar powered trucks and wind-powered cranes. And no more flights to anywhere unless you have a pedal powered hang-glider or one of those marvelous solar planes that takes 2 months to cross the US.
Holidays in Hawaii would be for people who like to row (a lot).
Soon will come the time when everyone says “I always knew it was wrong”.
Tim Montgomerie notes the great backdown of Kevin Rudd on the carbon tax and lays out the global carnage in the climate meme:
Throughout the world green politicians are presiding over similar climbdowns. From Washington to London, shale gas rather than any renewable technology is seen as the future. Even nations such as Germany and Spain, which led the march to green energy, are slashing unaffordable subsidies to the renewables industry. British Conservative Nigel Lawson has claimed that the average share price of companies in the renewable sector has fallen by 80 per cent over five years. “One renewable company after another is going bankrupt,” he declared. The heavy cost of green energy policies might have been justifiable if they had delivered results, but they haven’t. Since the Kyoto treaty on climate change, global emissions have continued to rise. Since 1990 they have increased by about 50 per cent. China’s increase in emissions has been 25 times greater than the reduction by the EU’s core nations. In so far as Europe has actually met its environmental obligations, it has only done so by exporting industrial capacity (and jobs). Once the environmental impact of imported goods has been added to its carbon footprint, Europe has clearly failed to keep its environmental promises.
One commentator, Bjorn Lomborg, spelt out the futility of Europe’s unilateral environmentalism. Germany’s efforts to combat climate change might, he calculated, just possibly delay a rise in global temperatures by 37 hours, but that delay will have cost German taxpayers and consumers more than $US100 billion in the form of renewable subsidies and higher electricity costs. That’s about $US3bn an hour.
Green enthusiasts are kidding themselves if they blame the global economic slump for the failure of climate change policies. Their policies were always an attempt to defy economic gravity.
Montgomerie’s description of Rudd is very short:
… in the past 10 days one of the greenest of green politicians has to all intents, constructions and purposes given up. Last week, Australia’s green movement suffered a defeat at least as big as those of the country’s cricket and rugby teams. Rudd announced he would ditch the carbon tax that had threatened to consign his Labor Party to one of the worst defeats in its history…
Some will argue that Rudd has shifted to a trading scheme which is what he always wanted, and he’s only brought it forward by a year. But everyone knows that the reason for the shift was not because it would be “better for the climate” to reduce the carbon-price by 70%. Even Rudd himself admits the shift was to reduce the cost of living pressures.
Priority number one is not the environment. (But don’t expect Rudd to say that).
The Labor government recently promised to reduce the price of carbon from the world-record-high of $25 a ton to a probably-could-be might-look-like $6 a ton price, as it switches (possibly) from a Carbon Tax to an Emissions Trading Scheme.
The compensation that was promised to offset the Carbon Tax will still be paid to voters, even though the Carbon Tax might end. Thus bread and fishes will be supplied, but hardly anyone will have to bake or fish. The innovation comes thanks to the impending-electron-factor — a strange combination of the Fibbs-Boson*, and a Poll flavored Quark.
THE Rudd government has banked massive overcompensation into the federal budget for at least the next six years, if the carbon price fails to meet Treasury’s optimistic price projections.
More than 80 per cent of households will be overcompensated for the effect of the proposed emissions trading scheme by between $140 and $410 a year in 2019 if the price of carbon permits only rises to $10, new modelling shows. Even if the price of carbon reaches the $38 a tonne in 2019 that Treasury currently projects, more than 60 per cent of households, including practically all pensioners and single parents, will receive excess compensation of up to $45 a year in 2019. National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling senior researcher Ben Phillips said given a possible drop in the carbon price to $6 under an ETS, the compensation package was “arguably too generous”, offering between three and five times the carbon price impact in assistance.
“Around 90 per cent of households are fully compensated,” he said. “Households reliant on pensions and allowances are likely to remain adequately compensated for a very long time because their payments increase with the inflation or wages.”
Governments world-wide are admiring the brazen technique where 90 per cent of households are fully compensated. Both Singapore and Chile have issued a blanket invitation for the other 10% of Australian households to emigrate.
The intermittent power of wind towers plays havoc with electricity grids. Power black outs in India are so bad, they cut off the supply to 600 million or so people for two days last year. To make the grid more stable, an official somewhere decided it would help to have at least one day’s warning of how much electricity will flow from those towers. (Why not two days I say?)
“A directive took effect this week ordering wind farms with a capacity of 10 megawatts or more to forecast their generation in 15-minute blocks for the following day. “
To put some perspective on this, here is what 7000 wind turbines across Northern Europe (between the North sea, the Baltic Sea and the Austrian-Swiss border) produced in 2004. You can admire the stable predictable output that comes from averaging so many turbines over such a large area. Right?
Percentage of peak grid power supplied by 7000 wind turbines in Northern Europe in 2004
So, we might have an election next month, we might trade carbon next year, the carbon price might be $24, or $6, or $40. We might have a new government soon, or none of the above.
Hows that stability working out for us now Rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor?
Kevin Rudd announced The Tax would move to become The Trading Scheme. But he still has to get it through Parliament, and it’s not looking easy.
The Greens don’t like it — because free market solutions are only “right” when the price is what the Greens want it to be.
The Coalition don’t like it either, though they are not so good at explaining why (watch Greg Hunt struggle here). The Coalition aren’t brave enough to say they prefer their own “no regrets” policy that could be unwound when the namecalling stops and everyone admits cooling Earth by 0.0C was always a waste of money. The Coalition won’t have to pay billions in compensation to their Green Army, but they can’t say that either. They know the love-media would crucify them if they admitted publicly that it was possible the models might be wrong. The IPCC can say that it is 90% sure, but no one is allowed to talk about the 10% chance there is some other outcome*. So we come to this bizarre moment in politics.
To get the Carbon Pox off his back, Rudd might have to recall Parliament, which everyone assumed was dead and buried for this government, and which also means debate on the floor and tricky questions. But even the zombie Parliament may rise, hints Rudd.
LABOR says it would attempt to drive through legislation to terminate the carbon tax a year ahead of schedule if parliament was to reconvene before the election.
But the Greens immediately put paid to any Labor plan, saying there was “no way” the minor party would allow legislation to fast-track the move to an emissions trading scheme through the parliament, now or after the federal election.
Climate Change Minister Mark Butler said laws to scrap the fixed price and move to an internationally-linked emissions trading scheme on July 1 next year would be ready before this year’s federal election.
“In the event that parliament were to resume before the election, I could take draft legislation to the parliament,” he told the ABC this morning.
“It may well be that legislation would be rejected by either house, in which case we would take it to the election seeking a mandate from the people,” he said.
On Monday on the 7:30 report Bill McKibben said the carbon price could even get to $40 a ton (and for once, I thought, let that man keep talking):
“…moving to an emissions trading system means that the price will be set by the market. If the European price turns out to be $40 a tonne next year, the Australian price will be $40 a tonne. How can you get to $40 a tonne? Well the exchange rate falls by 30 per cent, the Australian dollar value of permits will go up by 30 per cent, because now they’re set in Euros. The forecast should not be the basis of the policy. They got it wrong the first time by doing that, they’re potentially going to get it wrong again.”
Meanwhile the Labor Party are pretending they are helping Australians become $380 better off with their “new plan” — when they are really promising not to force people to pay as much as they originally planned, and in any case, the commissars in the EU (and forex traders) will be the ones who decide how much the Australian electricity bill will fall by.
Now Rudd’s-latest-clever-plan to find the money to get rid of the Carbon Pox is to play tricks with the Fringe Benefits Tax, which evidentially helps people buy thousands of Australian-made Holdens, Fords and Toyotas. With Ford gone and Holden teetering on the brink, could it be that Rudd will “save” millions, but force businesspeople to waste hours keeping detailed logs? And then in the aftermath, Rudd will hand back millions from taxpayers to keep Holden from going under? With every week, business plans and career paths are hitting the shredder. The bureaucratic carnage knows no bounds…
Remember the aim of the Hung Parliament Festivities in September 2010? Here in Australia the big most important Thing was “stability” for business. End the Uncertainty, they chanted. Yes indeedy. It was never about stability for business, who are getting shafted at every turn, it was about stability for politicians wasn’t it Rob and Tony?
Punters are betting on election dates (August 24 or 31 maybe October 19). Odds for a Coalition win are at $1.40, an ALP win at $3ish.
h/t to Peggy for the betting odds.
*Yes, we know the models are already proven wrong. This is a hypothetical.
Not only does one particular grass seem quite happy at 700ppm, it was absorbing 30% more carbon dioxide, and there was no sign that it might not be equally happy at even higher levels. Will disaster strike the world at 401ppm? This 19 year study suggests (again) it might not be so bad. Arguably, 700ppm might be better. Even the C4 plants (supposedly the ones which prefer low CO2) still absorbed 13% more CO2 at 700ppm. (Absorbing more carbon usually means growing faster.)
During the worst drought years, growth slowed dramatically, but drought-stricken plants with 700ppm of CO2 around them still absorbed 4% more.
Under elevated carbon dioxide levels, wetland plants can absorb up to 32 percent more carbon than they do at current levels, according to a 19-year study published in Global Change Biology from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. With atmospheric CO2 passing the 400 parts-per-million milestone this year, the findings offer hope that wetlands could help soften the blow of climate change.
Plant physiologist Bert Drake created the Smithsonian’s Global Change Ecological Research Wetland in 1987 at Edgewater. Back then, most scientists thought plants would gradually stop responding to rising CO2. Whether or not terrestrial ecosystems could assimilate additional carbon—and act as powerful carbon sinks—was not known. This study tracked not only how much CO2 wetlands absorb, but also the impact of rising temperature and sea level, changing rainfall and plant type.
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