Category: Climate Change

Myth: Climate change will have some benefits.  Climate alarmists need to take a breath and weigh the pros and cons of global warming.

Fact: The cons outweigh the pros by a large margin, and the cons are far more extreme in nature.  This has been understood for years.  Many of the alleged benefits are based on a misconception of how global warming will actually affect out atmosphere and oceans.

Global Warming: Pros and Cons

There are those who claims that climate change will have some positive impacts on the Earth, and that this needs to be weighed against the negative outcomes. However, the positive/negative outcomes have been long since compared, and the concern over climate change is due to the overwhelming negative results.

One such example: CO2 is GOOD for plant, and we should weigh this and other positive aspects against their negative counterparts.

The effects have already been published

Here are some snippets from a 2008 IPCC Paper:

However, the large-scale implications of CO2 –water interactions (i.e., at canopy, field and regional level) are highly uncertain. In general, it is recognised that the positive effects of elevated CO2 on plant water relations are expected to be offset by increased evaporative demand under warmer temperatures.

Many recent studies confirm and extend TAR findings that temperature and precipitation changes in future decades will modify, and often limit, direct CO2 effects on plants. For instance, high temperatures during flowering may lower CO2 effects by reducing grain number, size and quality (Thomas et al., 2003; Baker et al., 2004; Caldwell et al., 2005). Likewise, increased water demand under warming may reduce the expected positive CO2 effects.

Impacts of climate change on irrigation water requirements may be large. A few new studies have further quantified the impacts of climate change on regional and global irrigation requirements, irrespective of the positive effects of elevated CO2 on crop water-use efficiency.

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A recent article published by Nature Geoscience states that limiting warming to 1.5 °C is feasible with current emission pledges (Note: emission PLEDGES, not current emission levels). What this means is that it’s not too late to avoid a 2 °C increase in average global temperatures, which itself would have disastrous consequences, but was a benchmark climatologists were hoping to avoid surpassing.

From the abstract:

If CO2 emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit 2100 warming to 1.5 °C, with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation, net future cumulative CO2 emissions are unlikely to prove less than 250 GtC and unlikely greater than 540 GtC. Hence, limiting warming to 1.5 °C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening near-term emissions reductions would hedge against a high climate response or subsequent reduction rates proving economically, technically or politically unfeasible.

Climate denier sources have falsely promoted the idea that scientists have admitted that they had exaggerated global warming.

In fact, Breitbart somehow managed to translate this into:

The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true.

Which is of course, false.  The paper is saying that it may be possible to limit warming to 1.5 °C IF emissions are cut to the degree that emission pledges propose.

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