Thread by @ncdave4life

@JimBair62221006 1/19
Here's what manmade climate changes is REALLY doing. This is what you are campaigning against:

“’Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass… Now you have people grazing their camel…"
tinyurl.com/NatGeo2009

@JimBair62221006 2/19
Excerpt:

"Vast swaths of North Africa are getting noticeably lusher due to warming temperatures, new satellite images show, suggesting a possible boon for people living in the driest part of the continent."

@JimBair62221006 3/19
@NewScientist reported the "remarkable environmental turnaround," including a “quite spectacular regeneration of vegetation,” and "a 70 per cent increase in yields of local cereals such as sorghum and millet in one province in recent years."
sealevel.info/Pearce2002_Afr…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 4/19
Note that sorghum & millet are C4 plants. It was once thought that, unlike C3 plants, C4 plants would benefit little from rising CO2 levels. But C4 crops are favored for their drought-hardiness, and eCO2 is especially beneficial under dry conditions.

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 5/19
Crop yields are outpacing population growth for several reasons, but one of the important reasons is rising CO2 levels, which have improved global agricultural yields by about 20%, and as the CO2 level increases so does that improvement.

ourworldindata.org/crop-yields

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 6/19
The fact that elevated CO2 (eCO2) improves crop yields & mitigates drought impacts is helping to make famines rare for first time in history.

ourworldindata.org/famines

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 7/19
If you're too young to understand how important that is, count yourself blessed! Famine used to be a scourge comparable to war & disease. In the Bible it was the "Third Horseman of the Apocalypse."

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 8/19
The importance is impossible to overstate. Compare:

● Covid-19 killed ≈0.05% of world population, so far.

● 1918 flu pandemic killed ≈2%.

● WWII killed ≈2.7%.

● The global drought & famine of 1876-78 killed ≈3.7%, when CO2 level (from ice cores) was ≈289 ppmv.

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 9/19
When I was a child, horrific famines were often in the news, in places like Bangladesh & Africa. But Bangladesh and India now have food surpluses, every year. Rising CO2 level is one of the reasons for that.

Food gluts are a MUCH better problem than famines!

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 10/19
The Earth is greening, thanks to elevated CO2 -- especially in arid regions:
sealevel.info/greening_earth…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 11/19
NASA measures it, from satellites:

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 12/19
Elevated CO2 (eCO2) is beneficial for almost all ecosystems. In fact, eCO2 even helps pine forests withstand bark beetles.

academic.oup.com/treephys/artic…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 13/19
Elevated CO2 helps warm the Earth, but there's no convincing evidence that's harmful. In fact, scientists call warm climate periods "climate optimums."

Plus, elevated CO2 is VERY beneficial for agriculture — a fact known to science for >100 years.
tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 14/19
We'll never get CO2 to anywhere near optimum (Cretaceous/Jurassic) levels, but the modest increase so far is helping both man and nature.

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 15/19
The imagined major harms of manmade climate change simply are not happening. For instance, sea-level trends haven't changed significantly since the 1920s.

sealevel.info/learnmore.html…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 16/19
The great Nobel laurate & climatology pioneer Svante Arrhenius foresaw the benefits of eCO2, way back in 1908.
tinyurl.com/arrhenius1908p…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 17/19
Arrhenius even predicted "Arctic amplification" -- the fortunate fact that that the warming effect of elevated CO2 is disproportionately at high latitudes, where it beneficially makes the frigid climates slightly less harsh:

sealevel.info/Arrhenius_pola…

@JimBair62221006 @newscientist 18/19
The scientific evidence is compelling that manmade climate change is modest and benign, and CO2 emissions are beneficial, rather than harmful.

Here are some relevant papers.
sealevel.info/negative_socia…