Tag: fertilization effect

On the CO2 Fertilization Effect (real science for EPA)

“What would happen if CO2 doubled from the current approximately 400 ppm in the atmosphere to 800 ppm? Crop yields worldwide would increase by about 40%, based on empirical findings of how CO2 concentrations affect crop yields.”

A serene forest scene showcasing lush greenery, sunlight filtering through the trees, and a pathway winding through vibrant underbrush and flowers.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“What would happen if CO2 doubled from the current approximately 400 ppm in the atmosphere to 800 ppm? Crop yields worldwide would increase by about 40%, based on empirical findings of how CO2 concentrations affect crop yields.” (Lindzen and Happer, below)

“Greenhouse Gases and Fossil Fuels Climate Science” by Richard Lindzen (MIT) and William Happer (Princeton University) contains many arguments against climate alarmism and thus the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, now subject to reversal. This particular section of the recent Lindzen/Happer study (April 2025) concerns real science, CO2 science, versus non-testable, causality-errant climate models. This testimony in regard to the repeal of the CO2 endangerment finding will be important.

Lindzen/Happer’s general conclusion is (p. 43): “The common belief that CO2 is the main driver of climate change and the EPA Endangerment Finding assertion that ‘elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated’ to endanger the public health and welfare are scientifically false.” A key argument concerns the undeniable benefits of CO2, stated as follows.

Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere increases the amount of food that plants produce, a phenomenon called “fertilization.” Thousands of experimental results demonstrate that more CO2 usually increases the amount of food that plants produce.46 A graphic illustration of the response of plants to increases in CO2 is shown below. Dr. Sherwood Idso grew Eldarica (Afghan) pine trees with increasing amounts of CO2 in experiments, starting with an ambient CO2 concentration of 385 ppm. He showed what happens when CO2 is increased from 385 ppm to 535 ppm, 685 ppm and 835 ppm over 10 years: 47 (Page 18)

A series of images showing a researcher standing next to potted Eldarica pine trees labeled with different CO2 concentrations: ambient (385 ppm), 535 ppm, 685 ppm, and 835 ppm, illustrating the growth response of the trees to increased CO2 levels.

The “fertilization” effect varies significantly by type of plant. Dr. Craig Idso reported, “[s]ince the start of the Industrial Revolution, it can be calculated … that the 120-ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration increased agricultural production per unit land area” for various crops ranging from 28% to 70%, and averaging 46%.48 He also reported “CO2–induced activity productivity increase[d]” one of the varieties of rice by 263%,49 and that a 300 ppm increase in CO2 resulted in an average increase of 46%.50

What would happen if CO2 doubled from the current approximately 400 ppm in the atmosphere to 800 ppm? Crop yields worldwide would increase by about 40%, based on empirical findings of how CO2 concentrations affect crop yields.51

What if the Net Zero Theory went into effect now and CO2 does not double to 800 ppm? There would be 40% less food worldwide. Thus, more CO2 means more food for people worldwide. Reducing CO2 to Net Zero means less food for people worldwide, but with only a negligible effect on temperature.

Sylvan Wittwer, the father of agricultural research on this topic, eloquently emphasized the enormous benefits of providing more food to people worldwide by rising CO2:

“The rising level of atmospheric CO2 could be the one global natural resource that is progressively increasing food production and total biological output … The effects know no boundaries, and both developing and developed countries are, and will be, sharing equally.”52

———————–

46 See, e.g., NIPCC, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts (2014); Craig Idso, “What Rising CO2 Means For Global Food Security” CO2 Coalition (2019); Plant Growth Database, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
47 Craig Idso, Increased Plant Productivity: The First Key Benefit of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment, Master Resource (Apr. 21, 2022).
48 Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts (2014) p. 322.

49 Craig Idso, Estimates of Global Food Production in The Year 2050: Will We Produce Enough to Adequately Feed the World?, p. 31 (2011).
50 Craig Idso, The Positive Externalities of Carbon Dioxide, CO2 COALITION (2013) p. 3 (discussed in Wrightstone, supra, p. 19).
51 One of the authors (Happer) explained that experiments with CO2 fertilization show that many crop yields increase by a factor x with adequate water and other nutrients, where x is the ratio of the current CO2 ppm level to the former level. Doubling from 400 to 800 ppm means x = 800/400 = 2, and √2 = 1.41, implying approximately a 40% increase. (Note it would take more than a century for CO2 to reach 800 ppm).
52 Quoted in NIPCC, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels (2019), pp. 322–23.

OCO Satellites: Fancy Tools, Empty Pockets

One of the most reliable tells in the climate shell game is a government program with a name that promises “carbon” and delivers something suspiciously less concrete. Enter the OCO satellites—Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which, right off the bat, don’t actually measure “carbon.” They measure CO₂. It’s like opening a box labeled “Mystery Steak” and finding tofu.

An artistic rendering of a satellite equipped with solar panels and scientific instruments, positioned in space above Earth.

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

One of the most reliable tells in the climate shell game is a government program with a name that promises “carbon” and delivers something suspiciously less concrete. Enter the OCO satellites—Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which, right off the bat, don’t actually measure “carbon.” They measure CO₂. It’s like opening a box labeled “Mystery Steak” and finding tofu.

If you want a tale of cosmic hubris stitched to pure bureaucratic ambition, look no further than NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites—OCO by name, not by actual carbon content. These polished tin cans were launched to spy on atmospheric CO₂ from space, the latest chapter in humanity’s endless fantasy that, if we just measure nature sharply enough, we might finally drag the carbon cycle kicking and screaming under bureaucratic control.

The original OCO was a flame-out before the party started—launched in 2009, it belly-flopped into the Southern Ocean. NASA called this a “launch vehicle anomaly”—which is bureaucratese for “the thing blew up.”

Then, like every Hollywood flop, we got the sequel: OCO-2, plucky and determined, rising phoenix-like in July 2014. Imagine NASA muttering “this time for sure” and clutching its high-resolution spectrometer like a blackjack player eyeing his last stack of chips.

What does OCO-2 do? It chases reflected sunlight—zeroing in on those precise, CO₂-hungry wavelengths the gas loves to slurp up. With this, OCO-2 pulls the ultimate global neighborhood watch: polar sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it goes pole to pole, day after day, circling the globe every sixteen spins of the Earth. The result? Near-global selfies of the planet’s every atmospheric sigh, with precision down to less than one part per million. Yes, it picks out the smallest seasonal burp in CO₂ from the leafy lungs of the world; yes, climate modelers treat its graphs like sacred runes; no, it won’t find your missing car keys.

And then came OCO-3—the inevitable space family photo. Shuttled up to the International Space Station in 2019, this cousin gets to peek sideways, take “action shots” in new viewing geometries, and basically try angles even OCO-2 didn’t dare. Think of it as the satellite version of a go-pro on a skateboard: more, more, always more coverage.

So the OCO saga rolls on—a dazzling dance of technical triumphs, fizzled launches, and a hope bordering on superstition: if we can just catalog the ghostly flux of carbon well enough, maybe we’ll wrestle the climate into submission. It’s noble, in a way. Or maybe it’s just expensive performance art for an audience allergic to low budgets and short stories. Either way, it’s one hell of a ride—assuming you’re not footing the bill.

Now, with the Trump Administration threatening to pull the plug on OCO, the usual suspects are sounding the klaxons— “Catastrophe! The data! The lost science!” Yet, I did what apparently nobody at NASA, NOAA, or CNN ever attempts: I actually looked at what the satellites have coughed up, and whether anyone—any actual person, business, or government—has found these cosmic spreadsheets useful outside of tenure applications and conference circuit PowerPoints.

Map showing averaged carbon dioxide concentration across the globe from October 1 to November 11, 2014, as measured by OCO-2 satellite. Color gradient indicates CO₂ levels with values ranging from 387 to 402.5 ppm.

First, let’s take the case most likely to give the climate alarmists the vapors: a real, honest-to-god, peer-reviewed study that used OCO data to figure out how much more corn, soy, and wheat the Midwest is pumping out thanks to the CO₂ “fertilization effect.” The math, by Taylor and Schlenker, goes like this: for every 1 ppm rise in CO₂ measured from space, corn yields go up 0.5%, soybeans 0.6%, wheat 0.8%. Over the last decade, thanks in part to 20 ppm worth of bonus CO₂, global farmers collected an extra $71.7 billion worth of food, including $4 billion a year for U.S. corn alone. If you’re a wheat farmer, this is the part where you lift your hat and say, “Thanks to fossil fuels for all the carbon dioxide!”

But here’s the rub. These dollars aren’t landing in anyone’s account because of OCO. They’re landing because… well, CO₂ went up. The OCO satellites simply told us, after the fact, how green the grass grew. Their role is “observer,” not “rainmaker.” If you’re waiting for a case where a power utility, a city, a trader on the CBOT, or even a budget-stressed county extension officer flipped through OCO’s gigabytes and made a buck, I hope you packed a lunch and a good book.

The supposed “applications” for OCO-2 data beyond academic joyrides? They’re a gospel of indirectness. “National carbon accounting.” “Large-scale scientific assessments.” “Paris Agreement verification.” “Model input.” If you boil this all down, what you get is more paperwork, higher-resolution graphs, and the chance for government ministries to add another decimal point to emission numbers with satellite snapshots. The impact on your life, the price of your groceries, or the peril to your electrical grid? Round off to zero.

Best I can tell, not a single primary source—not NASA, not peer-reviewed journals, not the Paris Agreement’s own secretariat—documents any organization, utility, or corporation making a real-world, real-money decision using OCO data. Every “benefit” is hypothetical, every “application” is a footnote for a climate negotiation PowerPoint, and every stakeholder story ends a step before anything actually happens.

So when the media lights up with righteous indignation about the imminent unplugging of the OCO satellites, it’s not because the world stands to lose operations, dollars, or even actionable knowledge. It’s because a lot of institutional, academic, and consulting interests stand to lose a reliable grant generator—a justification parade for more “urgent” research, more staff, more servers buzzing away in the service of an endless, mostly circular, pursuit of “climate verification.”

Could I have missed a secret billion-dollar industry quietly built on real-time OCO data? Well, sure. And if those unicorns take up day-trading next week, I’ll issue an apology.

Until then, the obvious answer is: if a satellite’s only measurable benefit is keeping research staff busy and PowerPoint decks vivid, it’s better to let the thing burn up, let the lights go out at OCO HQ, and see if maybe, just maybe, someone finds a direct use for satellite data that isn’t another exercise in scientific navel-gazing. Otherwise, call it what it is:

A very fancy, very expensive cosmic spectator sport.

My very best regards to all of you on a lovely summer morning,

w.

My Usual Request: When you comment, please quote the exact words that you are referring to. It avoids endless misunderstandings.

Yes, Arizona Republic, Arizona’s Wine Industry Can Continue to Thrive Amidst Climate Change

The Arizona Republic ran a story expressing worry that the state’s “booming” wine industry will be unable to cope with climate change. This is false. The commercial wine industry is of fairly recent vintage, arising amidst and beginning to thrive during ongoing climate change. No measurable temperature or weather trends suggest it won’t be able to keep flourishing in the future.

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

The Arizona Republic ran a story expressing worry that the state’s “booming” wine industry will be unable to cope with climate change. This is false. The commercial wine industry is of fairly recent vintage, arising amidst and beginning to thrive during ongoing climate change. No measurable temperature or weather trends suggest it won’t be able to keep flourishing in the future.

In the Arizona Republic story, “Arizona’s wine industry is booming — but can it weather the climate crisis?,” Amanda Luberto assumes there is a climate crisis, without presenting any evidence that such a crisis exists, much less that climate change is negatively impacting Arizona’s “booming” wine industry.

“Arizona’s wine regions are some of the most up-and-coming in the country,” writes Luberto. “In May, Wine Enthusiast named Sonoita, Arizona, as one of the five regions vying to become the next Napa Valley.”

“Sonoita is one of three American Viticultural Areas in the state, and due to their higher elevation, they make excellent locations in the desert to grow wine [as a result] [u]nlike the greater Phoenix metro area, these parts of Arizona don’t see triple-digit temperatures nearly every day in the summer and they also get a lot of rain,” Luberto continues before shifting the story’s focus to climate alarm. “But that is quickly changing and creating what one expert called ‘global weirdness.’”

Of what “global weirdness” consists and the evidence for it is left for her readers to guess, unless they listen to the podcast she recommends. Having listened to the podcast, it seems the climate concerns vexing Arizona’s vintners are, perhaps surprisingly, frost and adequate monsoon rainfall. In general, data indicate that rather than getting weirder, making growing harder, conditions have improved during the recent period of modest warming.

Arizona’s modern wine industry was launched in the late 1970s, when temperatures were slightly cooler than today and carbon dioxide emissions were lower. The industry, however, didn’t begin to take off and enter the current boom period until the 2000s. Since 2011, the number of wine producers and employment in the industry has skyrocketed, increasing by 200 percent and 500 percent respectively, so there is no evidence whatsoever climate change has hampered Arizona’s wine industry. Rather, there is good evidence that modest warming and higher CO2 levels have tended to foster or enhance wine production in the state.

First, as with other crops, grape production has been enhanced by the fertilization effect of increased atmospheric CO2. The same effect has also improved the efficiency of grapes water use, resulting in less water being lost during transpiration.

Concerning frost, the National Centers for Environmental Information’s (NCEI) State Climate Summary for Arizona shows that the observed number of very cold nights has decreased substantially over the past 90 years, and the number of warm nights has increased. (See the graph, below)

Observed annual number of very cold nights (minimum temperature of 0°F or lower) for Arizona from 1930–2020. The number of very cold nights has been below average since 1980, indicative of warming in the region. Sources: CISESS and NOAA NCEI.

Some grape varietals spring up early, and an unexpected, late-season frost can stunt their growth or kill the buds and shoots. As a result of the warmer nights and the decline in extremely cold nights, there has been a decline grape-killing spring frost. In fact, as can be seen in the graph above, Arizona’s commercial wine industry’s birth and expansion coincides with the long-term decline in extremely cold nights.

Much of Arizona is arid or semi-arid with relatively little precipitation. In Arizona, annual monsoons delivering sufficient rainfall during the growing period is critical to grape production. The NCEI state summary for Arizona shows that even in periods of below average monsoon rainfall, Arizona’s vineyards have received adequate amounts of rain to increase production. Monsoon rainfall amounts are highly variable from year to year. Although, since 2000, 15 of the 24 years had below average monsoon rainfall, it has not hampered production. Monsoon rainfall is highly localized.

Concerning drought, although much of Arizona is currently experiencing a multi-year drought, the length and severity of the recent drought falls far short of the drought severity experienced in the late-1800s through the early 1900s when temperatures were generally cooler and CO2 levels were lower than at present.

In short, Luberto and the Arizona Republic provide no evidence of “global weirdness” or a “climate crisis” that is, or might in the future, impact wine production in Arizona. Monsoons trends have waxed and waned across Arizona’s history, and the threat of deadly-to-grapes late-season frosts is declining. So, to answer the question Luberto posed in her headline, yes, based on current trends, Arizona’s wine industry is well situated to adapt to and even thrive amid present climate change.

Paper finds the world was cooling for most of the last 2,000 years and started warming long before Big Coal arrived

A Chinese group has looked at all the different kinds of 2,000 year long proxies in the PAGES dataset and found that history looks quite different depending on which proxy you pick. Only the tree rings show the HockeyStick shape that matches the climate models. In other proxies, temperatures have fallen for most of the last 2,000 years, especially in the Southern half of the world. And even after the recent warming, we are not yet back to the temperatures the Romans lived through.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

How much money has the world wasted because of some tree ring studies?

A Chinese group has looked at all the different kinds of 2,000 year long proxies in the PAGES dataset and found that history looks quite different depending on which proxy you pick. Only the tree rings show the HockeyStick shape that matches the climate models. In other proxies, temperatures have fallen for most of the last 2,000 years, especially in the Southern half of the world. And even after the recent warming, we are not yet back to the temperatures the Romans lived through.

So yet again, we see that that current temperatures are not unusual except according to tree rings, which we know are affected by rising levels of CO2. (The paper does not mention CO2 or carbon or fertilizer).

“All the evidence points out that we are still far from a complete understanding of the Common Era temperature variability at hemispheric and global scales,” says Professor Yang.”

“We show that the millennial cooling of annual mean temperatures is likely a global phenomenon.”

The world according to tree-rings is at the top, and other proxies, below:

The map showing that the proxies are spread around the world. There are not that many proxies stretching back 2,000 years:

Figure 1 Locations of the proxy data used for the temperature reconstructions over the past 2000 years.

The paper looked closely at how all the proxies responded to volcano eruptions, and tree rings do seem to be useful. But without acknowledging that trees love carbon dioxide and grow faster with the fertilization effect of extra CO2, it feels like they are dancing around the point. They said tree rings capture the variability of shorter periods (less than 200 years) but that non tree ring proxies were better for variations longer than 200 years. The news that matters the most to mum and dad voters is that they found a significant long term cooling trend, but that information is buried in the text.

And as so many proxies have shown, global warming started back in the late 1600s, long before human emissions of CO2 started.

UPDATE: Look at the non-tree-ring proxy — the warming began in the Southern Hemisphere before 1700AD. See also the 120 proxies of Christiansen and Ldundqvist, and the signal in China. What started that? Climate modelers have no idea. It wasn’t cars and coal power. It wasn’t man-made CO2. We don’t understand the big forces that drive our climate, yet we make you pay for your imaginary sins anyway.

Study finds temperature reconstructions during the Common Era are affected by the selection of paleoclimate data

PhysOrg:   “… we wanted to know how our understanding of climate in the past is dependent on proxies,” says Professor Bao Yang. A paper on this topic is published in the journal Science China Earth Sciences.

To do so, the research team led by Professor Yang integrated the longest millennial paleoclimate data in the PAGES proxy network into new versions of global and hemispheric reconstructions of annual temperatures. The results show that the rate of pre-industrial millennial cooling in global and hemispheric temperatures varies according to proxy combination, with the strongest cooling revealed by non-tree-ring proxies.

Yang and colleagues compared the volcanic responses and spectral characteristics of tree-ring and non-tree-ring records. They found that the properties of tree-ring and non-tree-ring data differ significantly.

REFERENCE

Bao Yang et al, (2024) The influence of proxy selection on global annual mean temperature reconstructions during the Common Era, Science China Earth Sciences. DOI: 10.1007/s11430-024-1348-3