Guest Comment: CO2 and the Garden of Eden climate change

A study quoted in Investors Business Daily recently reviews the impact of rising CO2 levels and finds as a resultant a future world of lush vegetation and thriving agriculture.

Carbon dioxide, the gas some see as a threat is indeed the key to life on earth.

The G-8 Summit announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 at the same time researchers at the Johann Heinrich von Theunen Institute in Germany find the rise in carbon dioxide levels may in fact be a boon to plant life on earth.

The Theunen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 1999, trained CO2 jets on plants, raising CO2 concentrations in the air around them to 550 parts per million (PPM) significantly much higher than today’s levels.

The researchers announced this year that such increased exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields.

“Output increased by about 10 percent for barley, beets and wheat when plants were exposed to the higher levels, according to the Institute’s Hans Joachim Weigel.

That the Earth is getting greener due to high CO2 levels was confirmed recently by satellite data analyzed by scientists Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Remani of NASA, They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth’s vegetation increased by an amazing 6.2 percent.

“Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates,” explained Lawrence Solomon in a recent article on The Running/Hemani findings in Canada’s Financial Post.

“Plants provide food for animals which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”

Carbon dioxide has become the poster child for global warming advocates who constantly claim it’s the major greenhouse gas.

According to Al Gore, each time you exhale while reading this, you have contributed to global warming.

Carbon dioxide is in fact not a pollutant. Rather it is the basis of all plant, and therefore all animal life on Earth.

So says Dr. Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University, who notes that “carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher in the past, millions of years ago, when plants evolved around the world.”

“When carbon dioxide levels increase, plants grow faster, bigger, more resistant to any number of stresses, and more efficient in their use of water,” Balling says.

Hardly the scorched Earth scenario painted by global warm-mongers.

As atmospheric CO2 levels consistently have been increasing global mean temperatures have not kept pace. Warming has not been constant.

In fact, it has been interrupted periodically by - dare we say it? - global cooling, and seems to have stopped entirely in 1998.

These are not the kind of temperature fluctuations you’d expect in the face of steadily increasing CO2 emissions, if CO2 was the main culprit.

Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, notes that global mean temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century, rising significantly between 1919 and 1940, declining between 1940 and the early 1970s, rising again, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

As Solomon notes, CO2 levels were five to ten times highere when dinosaurs roamed the Earth on a fertile planet where lush vegetation sustained those immense beasts.

The Earth is cooler now than then, and cooler than it was during the Medieval Warming Period.

In that era, the climate was so warm that Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops there for centuries.

When Eric The Red brought settlers to Greenland in 986, the climate supported the Viking way of life based upon cattle, hay, grain and herring for the next 300 years.

Was it man-made pollution that allowed 300 years of Nordic settlement in Greenland?

Don’t think so.

While others worry about the demise of the planet, sit down and enjoy a nice green salad and take a deep breath.

Russell M. Heller says he has been a Green Valley area resident for 33 years. The views ex[ressed are the writer’s and not those of this newspaper.