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Study: Increased carbon dioxide benefits aspen trees
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Aspen trees, the backbone of Minnesota’s paper industry, are liking the extra carbon dioxide in the air linked to global warming.

New research published Friday found that aspen growth rates increased by 53 percent during the past half-century, as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased about 20 percent.

“Trees eat carbon dioxide for a living,” said Don Waller, study author and University of Wisconsin-Madison botany professor.

As carbon dioxide increases in the air, he said, plants can extract more of it and convert it to sugar through photosynthesis. That speeds up their growth.

…

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/environment/v-print/story/1365099.html

Santa Clause rebuttal = straw man.
Unrational= Not a word.
Stewardship = Not relevant because I didn’t bring it up/ straw man.
Home under the sea argument = fear mongering (funny thing is I live on an island so this should work on me)
Looking forward to my death and the death of people with similar religious belief = Thank you internet forum for providing a great place where interested minds can disagree in a respectful manner.
bman = hate filled brainwashed individual who has some personal issues that he takes out on this forum. Last time I respond to him.

One thing reading these books will tell you is that we are (or at least until we invented agriculture and civilization), in an Ice Age, a period where large continental glaciers oscillate between advancing and retreating, the advances and retreats being triggered by oscillations of the Earth’s rotation on its axis and wobbling in its orbit. However, those forcing factors become triggers, and the likely overall cause of the Ice Age, is probably (notice the use of words like probably, meaning the most likely hypothesis based on the best available evidence as we currently understand it) is that a general cooling period of millions of years became an Ice Age about 3,000,000 million years ago as tectonic plate movement caused circumstances that cause CO2 to be taken out of the atmosphere at a faster rate, lowering the equilibrium level for CO2 in the atmosphere, primarily through the mechanism of weathering of exposed rock in the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau, created as India crashes into Asia. Ironically, the advances of the glaciers, by covering rock in the Northern Hemisphere, slows this weathering process and causes a build up of CO2, raising the equilibrium level in the atmosphere and eventually starts a a warming process, along with a slight increase in solar energy resulting from the orbital cycles mentioned above, to start melting the glaciers. There have been seven major glaciations over the last 700,000 years, which in the deep time of Geology is basically last evening. Some of the inter-glacials lasted 15,000 years and some lasted 50,000. The best “guess’ right now is that we are in a 50,000 year interglacial.

By the way, one stupidest arguments made is that “Sun” is the cause Earth’s “warming” or “cooling” and the atmosphere has nothing to do with it. Actually, we have some real life natural experiments to control for the effect of atmosphere and the make up of an atmosphere on a planet’s temperture. They are named the Moon, Venus, and Mars. The Moon gets the same amount of sunlight as the Earth gets. However, it has no atmosphere to distribute it. Hence the sun side is around 300 degrees F, while the dark side of the Moon is around -350 degrees F. Venus, being closer than the Earth gets more sun, but not so much more to account for a 900 degree F surface. That is the result of its highly reduced atmosphere of CO2. Mars also has a reduced atmosphere, although far thinner than Venus’s, of predominately CO2. Mars CO2 makes it a warmer place than it would be otherwise (although still in a permanent Ice Age).

Basically, it comes down to this for me. We are, in burning vast amounts of coal, natural gas, and oil, and raising a lot of cattle and pigs, thereby raising the level of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere. I don’t think the increase in CO2 levels as measured in the atmosphere is something either Chris de Frietas or William Singer deny, to name two famous climate change deniers. As these gases have a very predictable effect of trapping more of Sunlight that the Earth’s receives and radiates back into Space in the infrared spectrum, and in the past increases in CO2 levels are associated with planet wide increases in tempertures, I need some explanation as to what mechanism will prevent that from happening now? This is where the deniers have repeatedly fail to produce any hypothesis supported by data.

And now, I will slip into polemic mode myself.

Finally, you may all want to read closely the story about the article in Climate Research published in 2003 that is the subject of so much sturm and drang about these CRU e-mails. Chris de Frietas was one of the editors of that journal. He published a paper by two other deniers, Willie Soon and Sallie Balinuas. When other scientists read the article, they found that it made several statements that the authors (and its editor) did not provide any supporting evidence or explanation as as to how they came to those conclusions and complained to the journal. In the controversy, the editor in chief, and two other editors resigned, although those losing their positions were scientitsts who believed the evidence on balance supports the hypothesis that recent increases in global tempertures were primarily the result of human activity, Chris de Frietas remained in his postion at that time. So those actually being suppressed were those who came down on anthogenic climate change side. The publisher of Climate Research, in an article published to explain it all, wrote the following about the particular article in dispute that De Frietas put out as “good” science.

“Major conclusions of Soon & Baliunas are: ‘Across the world, many
records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the
warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the
last millenium.’ (p. 89) and ‘Overall, the 20th century
does not contain the warmest anomaly of the past millenium
in most of the proxy records which have been
sampled world-wide’ (p. 104). While these statements
may be true, the critics point out that they cannot be
concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in
the paper. CR should have requested appropriate revisions
of the manuscript prior to publication.”

http://www.int-res.com/articles/misc/CREditorial.pdf

The irony here is that De Frietas, Soon, Balinuas, Singer, Lonborg, and other scientists doing “denial” have manipulated data, publishing unsubstantiated conclusions, hid the methodology by which they reached their conclusions, ignored data that contradicts their conclusions, and accused climate scientists of doing their work because they are “greedy” for grant money all the while growing rich from funds provided by oil and coal interests such as the Koch family, writing popular polemics for conservative publishers, and lecture fees on the Conservative Movement lecture circuit.

The reduction of snow cover on Kilamanjaro over the last century is a perfect regionalized example of the larger global effect. Deforestation of the lowlands surrounding the mountain have had the net effect of decreasing the local preceipitation to levels that don’t allow for the replenishment of the snows on the mountain. Same thing is happening with our glaciers too, on a larger scale.

The larger political implementation of this is a bit more profound. Carbon tax transfers will have absloultey ZERO affect on the continued deforestation of developing countries. They only taxe gas emissions. Of course politicians figured out that you can’t just blanketly take the money of industrialized countries just because South America is slash/burning their forests, you can only tax them for things they are actually doing, i.e. consuming fossil fuels. This is why I think the >issue< of Global Warming is a scam. Its a wealth transfer mechanism. Much like our current pending Health Care plan, if only we 'Do Something', we will delude ourselves that we are improving the situation. No – we won't we will only be doing what the special interests want us to do: Empty our pockets more, and ignore the ongoing problem as it continues to fester.

These highfalutin bozos need to learn a thing or two about democracy. It doesn’t matter what they try to demonstrate scientifically, but instead what the rest of us think, no matter how ridiculous it might seem to them. Presently, we (the 90.5%) feel that we are not being properly served by all scientific hubbub going around about global climate change. We suspect that this is yet another trick of the liberal left to interfere with the good Lord’s plan for the rest of us to grab and waste as much as we can before we kick the bucket, or to stop us from cranking out yet more and more grasping, narrow-minded philistines just like me.

Now if we could just stop wasting time on all that climate change nonsense and get back to discussing things people like me can appreciate, like:

Getting even lower taxes.

Imposing stable – or better yet – rising real estate and financial asset prices irrespective of family incomes or any other anchor in reality.

Maintaining a small, God-fearin’ government, except for law enforcement and military, medicare and social security (got to protect my fair share of goodies from all those hungry bastards out there that God told us need to multiply.)

Promoting free market and hard work (unless it means my company’s subsidy is gone or that I also have to compete on equal footing in world markets.)

Reinstalling “family” values in your government. MY family values that is.

Winning the “war” on terrorists and other dark, strange looking foreigners who don’t appreciate our kind help fixing their countries.

Finding out if Tiger Woods really did cheat on his wife with all those sinful women and what should be done about it.