“I realize lots of people don’t like government regulation, but the alternative is an out-of-control climate.” (A. Dessler: March 23, 2019)
Andrew Dessler, the climate alarmist’s alarmist and Michael Mann ally, is shifting from (highly uncertain) physical climate science to climate economics and policy analysis.
Dessler’s web page states:
My work has shifted towards the intersection of climate change and human society, with the goal of helping us better cope with the impacts of climate change. This includes work quantifying climate extremes and how climate change can alter them, as well as analyzing how climate change will stress crucial energy, water, and other infrastructure and human systems. This is a new area for me, so my ideas are still evolving.
Mark my words: this professor is eager to model the most extreme scenarios in his scare campaign. And don’t expect him to model the benefits of the human influence on climate (warmer nights, warmer winters, longer growing seasons, CO2 fertilization, etc.). It’s all costs, no benefits, from the human influence on climate–the deep ecology view that nature is optimal and we humans cannot think and plan for ourselves in the face of climate change. (People are just not buying the alarm, another story.)
Dessler fancies himself as an expert on energy choices (see here and here). He rejects the fundamental notion that energy density is game, set, and match for mineral energies relative to dilute, intermittent ones. (Just assume that cost does not matter, and he is half right.)
So, not surprisingly, Professor Dessler on Twitter announced he was going to teach the economics side of the climate-change debate and was looking for a free market economist to guest lecture on Zoom. He linked to a site that alleged that Milton Friedman “endorsed” a price on carbon dioxide (CO2).
I jumped on this in an email sent to Dessler (and John Nielsen-Gammon, his colleague at Texas A&M) on July 29, 2021.:
This interpretation [of Milton Friedman] is wrong.
Milton Friedman did not ever consider CO2 to be a pollutant. It is an emission, but not a pollutant causing demonstrable damage in a tort situation. https://www.masterresource.org/friedman-milton/milton-friedman-climate-realist/
Also, even when Friedman did not talk about CO2 or energy, his worldview worked against the whole climate agenda. I have a live post on this here:
It is interesting that you are branching out into free market economics and public policy. Keep an open mind! I think the more you study it, the more you will realize the limits to government planning and the importance of market forces and civil society. In fact, I think the continuing, open-ended boom in each of the fossil fuels makes adaptation, not mitigation, the easy choice for the climate dollar.
P.S. I cover Friedman’s energy views here (all of my MF posts are here. He endorsed my co-authored book Energy: The Master Resource with the back cover blurb: “This splendid book effectively debunks the widespread predictions of energy doom. Its factual base is comprehensive, its exposition clear and straightforward, and its economic reasoning sound.”
He and I also exchanged emails that I summarize here.
Final Comment
Professor Dessler did not respond to my email. I am part of his ‘cancel culture,’ no surprise there.
He knows he cannot win a debate with a reasoned critic of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation. Even E-mail exchanges with me leave him vulnerable.
“Angry Andy” stoops low to discredit his intellectual opponents, from physical climate science to climate economics to public policy (see here). I will continue to report, and let you decide.
———————–
My previous posts on Andrew Dessler can be found here.
Benefits of CO2 fertilization?
“Our baseline model indicates that anthropogenic climate change has reduced global agricultural total factor productivity by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.”
“Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth,” Ariel Ortiz-Bobea et al, Nature Climate Change, vol 11 pp 306–312 (2021).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1
Questions:
First, if you assume bad things from climate change, we get bad things from climate change. That begs the question.
Second, hasn’t agricultural productivity increased overall, making ‘would have’ speculative?
Third, third-world countries have serious problems from a lack of private property rights, hampered market exchange, rampant corruption–how do the studies adjust for this? Relatedly, how has agriculture performed in free countries where economic growth is the norm?
Fourth, what are the criticisms of the mentioned studies, such as from the CO2 Coalition, an organization that specializes in this area? They have citations of hundreds if not thousands of studies showing global greening and higher productivity from the enhanced greenhouse effect.
I didn’t assume anything — you can read the paper for yourself.
>> Second, hasn’t agricultural productivity increased overall, making ‘would have’ speculative? <<
Agricultural productivity depends on many variables, obviously, such as technology, techniques, climate, etc. That is, it's a multivariate function. It can be increasing in some variables while decreasing in others.
This paper shows that manmade climate change has retarded agricultural productivity from where it would otherwise be without it. That is to say, it's been a drag on agricultural productivity, a factor working against your claim of CO2 fertilization. (Many other factors are working against it as well.)
Now what happens as global warming and climate change increases, as it is bound to do, as atmospheric CO2 increases? After reading this paper, tell me if you think these deleterious effects will not keep increasing.
Here are 10 items that counter the claim that CO2 is good for crops. I highly doubt you can provide “thousands” showing the enhanced greenhouse effect is good for them.
“For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on these sensitivities and observed climate trends, we estimate that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of these three crops representing roughly 40 Mt or $5 billion per year, as of 2002.”
— “Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming,” David B Lobell and Christopher B Field 2007 Environ. Res. Lett. 2 014002 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/2/1/014002
“With a 1 °C global temperature increase, global wheat yield is projected to decline between 4.1% and 6.4%. Projected relative temperature impacts from different methods were similar for major wheat-producing countries China, India, USA and France, but less so for Russia. Point-based and grid-based simulations, and to some extent the statistical regressions, were consistent in projecting that warmer regions are likely to suffer more yield loss with increasing temperature than cooler regions.”
– B. Liu et al, “Similar estimates of temperature impacts on global wheat yields by three independent methods, Nature Climate Change (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3115
“Agriculture is one of the economic sectors most exposed to climate change impacts, but few studies have statistically connected long-term changes in temperature and rainfall with yields. Doing so in Europe is particularly important because yields of wheat and barley have plateaued since the early 1990s and climate change has been suggested as a cause of this stagnation. Here, we show that the impact of climate trends can be detected in the pattern of long-term yield trends in Europe. Although impacts have been large in some areas, the aggregate effect across the continent has been modest. Climate trends can explain 10% of the slowdown in wheat and barley yields, with changes in agriculture and environmental policies possibly responsible for the remainder.”
— “The fingerprint of climate trends on European crop yields,” Frances C. Moorea and David B. Lobell, PNAS vol. 112 no. 9, 2670–2675 (2015
“Total protein and nitrogen concentrations in plants generally decline under elevated CO2 atmospheres…. Recently, several meta-analyses have indicated that CO2 inhibition of nitrate assimilation is the explanation most consistent with observations. Here, we present the first direct field test of this explanation….. In leaf tissue, the ratio of nitrate to total nitrogen concentration and the stable isotope ratios of organic nitrogen and free nitrate showed that nitrate assimilation was slower under elevated than ambient CO2. These findings imply that food quality will suffer under the CO2 levels anticipated during this century unless more sophisticated approaches to nitrogen fertilization are employed.”
— “Nitrate assimilation is inhibited by elevated CO2 in field-grown wheat,” Arnold J. Bloom et al, Nature Climate Change, April 6 2014
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– University of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
“Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness,” E. N. J. Brookshire & T. Weaver, Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7148, May 4, 2015.
Abstract: “Dietary deficiencies of zinc and iron are a substantial global public health problem. An estimated two billion people suffer these deficiencies, causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. Most of these people depend on C3 grains and legumes as their primary dietary source of zinc and iron. Here we report that C3 grains and legumes have lower concentrations of zinc and iron when grown under field conditions at the elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration predicted for the middle of this century. C3 crops other than legumes also have lower concentrations of protein, whereas C4 crops seem to be less affected. Differences between cultivars of a single crop suggest that breeding for decreased sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 concentration could partly address these new challenges to global health.”
— “Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition,” Samuel S. Myers et al, Nature 510, 139–142 (05 June 2014).
“Greater levels of CO2 made no difference one way or the other. At higher temperatures plants open their pores, called stomata, to capture the elevated CO2, which boosts photosynthesis, greening the leaves. But plants also tend to close their stomata in warmer temperatures to prevent water loss. Mora says that on balance the two effects cancel out.”
— “Plants Will Not Flourish as the World Warms: A new study contradicts the notion that higher temperatures will enhance plant growth,” Mark Fischetti, Scientific American, June 10, 2015
“Crop Pests Spreading North with Global Warming: Fungi and insects migrate toward the poles at up to 7 kilometers per year,”
— Eliot Barford and Nature magazine, September 2, 2013
“Suitable Days for Plant Growth Disappear under Projected Climate Change: Potential Human and Biotic Vulnerability,”
— Camilo Mora et al, PLOS Biology, June 10, 2015
“Elevated CO2 (or low O2) atmospheric concentrations decrease rates of photorespiration and initially enhance rates of photosynthesis and growth by as much as 35% in most plants (C3 plants). This enhancement, however, diminishes over time (days to years), a phenomenon known as CO2 acclimation. Most studies suggest a strong link between CO2 acclimation and plant nitrogen status. Nitrogen is the mineral element that organisms require in greatest quantity.
“Carbon Dioxide Enrichment Inhibits Nitrate Assimilation in Wheat and Arabidopsis,” Arnold J. Bloom et al, Science, 14 May 2010, Vol. 328, Issue 5980, pp. 899-903.
General Mills CEO Ken Powell told the Associated Press, 8/30/2015:
“We think that human-caused greenhouse gas causes climate change and climate volatility, and that’s going to stress the agricultural supply chain, which is very important to us.”
“Anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide compromises plant defense against invasive insects,”
Jorge A. Zavala et al, PNAS, 5129–5133, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0800568105
“Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any supposed positives.” Smith et al. PNAS (2009),
“Rice yields decline with higher night temperature from global warming,” Shaobing Peng et al, PNAS v101 n27 9971-9975.
“Unfortunately, the simple idea that global warming could provide at least some benefits to humanity by increasing plant production is complicated by a number of factors. It is true that fertilizing plants with CO2 and giving them warmer temperatures increases growth under some conditions, but there are trade-offs. While global warming can increase plant growth in areas that are near the lower limits of temperature (e.g., large swaths of Canada and Russia), it can make it too hot for plant growth in areas that are near their upper limits (e.g., the tropics). In addition, plant productivity is determined by many things (e.g., sunlight, temperature, nutrients, and precipitation), several of which are influenced by climate change and interact with one another.”
“Does a Warmer World Mean a Greener World? Not Likely!,” Jonathan Chase, PLOS Biology, June 10, 2015.
“Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, carbon dioxide fertilization, and other factors.”
“Climate trends and global crop production since 1980,” D.B. Lobell et al, Science (July 29, 2011)
“For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on these sensitivities and observed climate trends, we estimate that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of these three crops representing roughly 40 Mt or $5 billion per year, as of 2002.”
— “Global scale climate–crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming,” David B Lobell and Christopher B Field 2007 Environ. Res. Lett. 2 014002 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/2/1/014002
“We also find that the overall effect of warming on yields is negative, even after accounting for the benefits of reduced exposure to freezing temperatures.”
— “Effect of warming temperatures on US wheat yields,” Jesse Tack et al, PNAS 4/20/15
“Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any supposed positives.” Smith et al. PNAS (2009),
“Grasses are fundamental to one of Earth’s most widespread biomes (grasslands), and provide roughly half of all calories consumed by humans (including wheat, rice, corn and sorghum). We estimate rates of climatic niche change in 236 species and compare these with rates of projected climate change by 2070. Our results show that projected climate change is consistently faster than rates of niche change in grasses, typically by more than 5000-fold for temperature-related variables. Although these results do not show directly what will happen under global warming, they have troubling implications for a major biome and for human food resources.”
“Climate change is projected to outpace rates of niche change in grasses,” F. Alice Cang et al, Biology Letters, 27 September 2016.DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0368.
“…The results consistently indicate that rising temperatures will lead to reductions in crop yields. An increase of 1°C would be more severe for global maize yield (7.4% decrease) than for rice (3.2% decrease), and decreases in maize yield in the United States would be twice those seen in India (10.3 and 5.2%, respectively). Although this work points to worrying consequences of a warming world, it remains very difficult to predict the cumulative impact of multiple factors related to climate change, such as elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and precipitation….”
“Crop yields expected to fall as temperatures rise,” Emily Morris, Science
08 Sep 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6355, pp. 1012-1013
DOI: 10.1126/science.357.6355.1012-f
“Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants?” Annie Sneed, Scientific American 1/23/18
From this article:
“Even with the benefit of CO2 fertilization, when you start getting up to 1 to 2 degrees of warming, you see negative effects,” she [Frances Moore, an assistant professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis] says. “There are a lot of different pathways by which temperature can negatively affect crop yield: soil moisture deficit [or] heat directly damaging the plants and interfering with their reproductive process.” On top of all that, Moore points out increased CO2 also benefits weeds that compete with farm plants.
“We know unequivocally that when you grow food at elevated CO2 levels in fields, it becomes less nutritious,” notes Samuel Myers, principal research scientist in environmental health at Harvard University. “[Food crops] lose significant amounts of iron and zinc—and grains [also] lose protein.”
“Temperature is a primary factor affecting the rate of plant development. Warmer temperatures expected with climate change and the potential for more extreme temperature events will impact plant productivity…. The major impact of warmer temperatures was during the reproductive stage of development and in all cases grain yield in maize was significantly reduced by as much as 80-90% from a normal temperature regime. Temperature effects are increased by water deficits and excess soil water demonstrating that understanding the interaction of temperature and water will be needed to develop more effective adaptation strategies to offset the impacts of greater temperature extreme events associated with a changing climate.”
— Jerry L. Hatfield and John H. Prueger, “Temperature extremes: Effect on plant growth and development,” Weather and Climate Extremes 10 (2015) 4–10.
“Corn Yields Under Higher Temperatures,”
Figure 18.3, p 421
U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2014 National Climate Assessment
“Temperature response surfaces for mortality risk of tree species with future drought,” Henry D Adams et al,
Environmental Research Letters, Volume 12, Number 11 (2017).
“Crop production losses associated with anthropogenic climate change for 1981-2010 compared with preindustrial levels,”
Toshichika Iizumi et al, International Journal of Climatology, 20 August 2018
Abstract:
“The accumulated evidence indicates that agricultural production is being affected by climate change. However, most of the available evidence at a global scale is based on statistical regressions. Corroboration using independent methods, specifically process‐based modelling, is important for improving our confidence in the evidence. Here, we estimate the impacts of climate change on the global average yields of maize, rice, wheat and soybeans for 1981-2010, relative to the preindustrial climate. We use the results of factual and non‐warming counterfactual climate simulations performed with an atmospheric general circulation model that do and do not include anthropogenic forcings to climate systems, respectively, as inputs into a global gridded crop model. The results of a 100‐member ensemble climate and crop simulation suggest that climate change has decreased the global mean yields of maize, wheat and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to the counterfactual simulation (preindustrial climate), even when carbon dioxide (CO2) fertilization and agronomic adjustments are considered. For rice, no significant impacts (−1.8%) are detected. The uncertainties in estimated yield impacts represented by the 90% probability interval that are derived from the ensemble members are −8.5 to +0.5% for maize, −8.4 to −0.5% for soybeans, −9.6 to +12.4% for rice and − 7.5 to +4.3% for wheat. Based on the yield impacts, the estimates of average annual production losses throughout the world for the most recent years of the study (20052009) account for 22.3 billion USD (B)formaize,6.5B for soybeans, 0.8 Bforriceand13.6B for wheat. Our assessment confirms that climate change has modulated recent yields and led to production losses, and our adaptations to date have not been sufficient to offset the negative impacts of climate change, particularly at lower latitudes.”
“The major impact of warmer temperatures was during the reproductive stage of development and in all cases grain yield in maize was significantly reduced by as much as 80-90% from a normal temperature regime.”
– Temperature extremes: Effect on plant growth and development, Jerry L. Hatfield and John H. Prueger, Weather and Climate Extremes 10 (2015) 4–10.
“Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any supposed positives.” Smith et al. PNAS (2009)
“Crop yields expected to fall as temperatures rise,” Emily Morris, Science
08 Sep 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6355, pp. 1012-1013
DOI: 10.1126/science.357.6355.1012-f
“We found that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends from 1980 to 2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8 and 5.5%, respectively, relative to a counterfactual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, carbon dioxide fertilization, and other factors.
“Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980,” David B. Lobell et al, Science 29 July 2011, v333.
**
“During a 20-year field experiment in Minnesota, a widespread group of plants that initially grew faster when fed more CO2 stopped doing so after 12 years, researchers reported in Science in 2018.”
McGee, certainly the world is greening, that’s well known. Is that a good thing? It’s a big change in ecosystems, and change threatens the species (plants and animals) that live there. Is it obvious more plants are a good thing?
They do decrease the Earth’s albedo and so are a positive feedback on global warming.
As for crop yields…. Yes, CO2 increases photosynthesis, but it also increases temperature and changes precipitation patterns. These affect crop yields too.
“Unfortunately, the simple idea that global warming could provide at least some benefits to humanity by increasing plant production is complicated by a number of factors. It is true that fertilizing plants with CO2 and giving them warmer temperatures increases growth under some conditions, but there are trade-offs. While global warming can increase plant growth in areas that are near the lower limits of temperature (e.g., large swaths of Canada and Russia), it can make it too hot for plant growth in areas that are near their upper limits (e.g., the tropics). In addition, plant productivity is determined by many things (e.g., sunlight, temperature, nutrients, and precipitation), several of which are influenced by climate change and interact with one another.”
“Does a Warmer World Mean a Greener World? Not Likely!,” Jonathan Chase, PLOS Biology, June 10, 2015.
—
“Higher CO2 tends to inhibit the ability of plants to make protein… And this explains why food quality seems to have been declining and will continue to decline as CO2 rises — because of this inhibition of nitrate conversion into protein…. “It’s going to be fairly universal that we’ll be struggling with trying to sustain food quality and it’s not just protein… it’s also micronutrients such as zinc and iron that suffer as well as protein.”
– University of California at Davis Professor Arnold J. Bloom, on Yale Climate Connections 10/7/14
—
I could go on — the scientific literature if full of studies that cast doubt on the idea the more CO2 is good for agriculture.
David: You can drown the comments sections with your cites, but the same can be done back to you. And much more. It is all at the CO2 Coalition website, that you should know forward and backward given your interest in the subject. https://co2coalition.org/studies-resources/
Second, it is counter-intuitive that warmer nights and longer growing seasons and warmer winters are not good for plant growth in a general sense. Strip out the climate models and just look at actual warming and plant growth and agriculture in the free countries of the world and let us know if this is not true.
The summer afternoon peaks? the warming there could be seasonally bad compared to the other things.
Would colder be better? Or is nature ‘optimal’ season by season, year by year, decade by decade….? I’d say warming, natural or anthropogenic is going in the right direction.
It’s a shame that your blog stripped out markers that separate the papers I posted. Now they just look like an unreadable mess. Thanks.
Sorry … I’ll blame it on climate change.