Update on the Climate Science Denier’s Praise of Increasing CO2

Update on the Climate Science Deniers’ Praise of Increasing CO2

Since a chief public climate science denier, Will Happer, met in the Gold-Labeled Trump Tower of New York City with our day-minus-two President-elect, the debate over climate science from 2011 of Happer vs. Michael MacCracken, a leader of climate science, resurfaced.  I dealt with this in the previous article in my blog.  I just attended a talk at UC Irvine from Dr. Gabe Kooperman, a Postdoc in the Department of Earth System Science here, which illustrates the advances and complexity which climate science can now handle, and provides a entirely different outlook on this situation.  Since it was so complex, and I am not a climate scientist, I will just give an overview of the talk.  (You have to actually have an undergraduate degree in climate science to fully even understand the vocabulary in the talk.)

To start, we review that present CO2 is at 400 ppm (parts per million by volume) of the atmosphere.  Pre-1750, it was 280 ppm.  In a hundred some years it may approach 1000 ppm if nothing is done to lower emissions.  Prof. Will Happer of Princeton Physics argued that since greenhouses pump up CO2 to 1000 ppm to increase plant growth, it must be good.  Dr. MacCracken argued that in nature, essentially, it takes a whole ecosystem in which plants realistically grow, to trace what the practical effects would be.  In a greenhouse, plants are given optimized light, temperature, water, fertilizer, safety from predatory bugs, and are pre-fertilized and grown from seeds.    

What Dr. Kooperman and UCI collaborators have done is to run the community climate model with higher resolution than the previous 100 km (or 60 miles) resolution, and projected rainfall around the earth.  His results focus most strongly on the heavily populated tropic regions of Africa and India, and the Amazon rainforest.  The tropics get the most rainfall, since they are the warmest region, and the ocean water is warmest there, and evaporates more than elsewhere.  (Today, California is about to be doused by more atmospheric rivers of rainfall called the Pineapple Express.  We need that water to end our five-year drought.)   These tropic regions also contain the largest amount of biodiversity on the planet, and the greatest carbon reserves in their soil, plants, and trees.

While more CO2 initially increases plant growth, it also causes the plants to evaporate less water, called transpiration.  This then lowers the amount of water vapor available for rain.  Then the high Andes come into play.  The moist Pacific tropic air cools as it climbs the high Andes, causing the water vapor to condense and rain out on the western side of the Andes, leading to more rainfall in Peru.  To the east of the Andes, the vast Amazon basin becomes more starved of rain.  (In California, this is why we have a snowpack in the Sierras in winter, which lasts to give us water in the summer.  It is also why we have deserts to the east of the Sierras, as in Las Vegas.  Unfortunately, global warming gives us a shorter snow season, and less snowpack for the summer.)

Then a complex of rising tropic moisture from the Amazon and easterly headed winds, actually takes the remaining moisture across the Atlantic, and deposits it on tropical Africa and India.  As a consequence, over the next 100 years, with unbridled CO2 emissions, the Amazon gets less rain, and tropical Africa and India get more rain.  This seems like a good outcome for Africa and India, which are currently in a drought.  But droughts do not last forever, and increases in average rainfall can cause a lot of flooding and crop destruction.

We see that a modernized version (only by six years) of the MacCracken takedown of Happer and climate deniers has not only involved a local ecosystem, but the entire earth.  Just as climate deniers deny global warming, they also play the cards upside down as well, and claim that CO2 is good for us.  They will probably attack the new calculations, since they claim climate scientists are frauds, and then also claim that the results are good for us.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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