LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[hap0206]

What I like zab, is a guy like this -- a scientist defending science
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Carbon dioxide: the good and the bad, the right and the wrong

“Carbon Dioxide: The Good News” – This is the title of a recent Global Warming Policy Foundation report (Goklany, 2015) that focuses on the benefits of CO2 for people. In a hard-hitting foreword, eminent physicist Freeman Dyson claims that the entire scientific and policy establishment has been suffering from a form of “tribal group-think” that involves systematically ignoring the “obvious” facts about CO2.
The reason I find this report dismaying is not that it misrepresents the science. In fact, much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature. But given the ever-increasing politicisation of climate science, its author evidently found it appropriate to set up a straw man hypothesis, according to which CO2 is said to be “evil and dangerous” (by whom?), and to write the report in a polemical way that tends to draw the reader to a conclusion that because this straw man can easily be burnt down, the current international interest in emissions reduction is entirely misguided. He accuses the IPCC (Working Group 2) of putting a particular, negative gloss on the impacts of climate change on crop yields, for example; but then he puts his own very particular gloss on several topics, including the celebrated warming “hiatus”, the subject of an extensive recent literature that he largely ignores, in favour of the popular pastime of rubbishing climate models.
What the science says

Let’s start with some of the many points where Goklany is quite right. I am paraphrasing what he says, but I think I have captured the essence; and added a few of my own asides.

CO2 is indeed “plant food”, as well as being essential to a habitable climate! Both facts are universally known by plant and climate scientists.

Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere enhance crop yields. (For C3 crops

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Bottom paragraph
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Finally, a comment about the unfortunate effects of political polarisation in science. I contend that Goklany, like previous contributors to the GWPF publication series, is in effect allowing the terms of discussion to be set by environmentalists! I do not think this is a good idea. It is peculiar that Goklany cites so much literature showing the beneficial effects of CO2 yet still appears to maintain that this work is ignored by scientists. It isn’t. We scientists produced this work, and we continue to use it and build on it. We do not claim that CO2 is “evil and dangerous”, nor do we imagine that models are truth! Polarisation makes for neither good science, nor sensible policy. Concern for human wellbeing is not the preserve of any one political tendency, and scientists are not lacking in it. We have a common interest; we should find a common cause.
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all of it here

https://granthaminstitute.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/carbon-dioxide-the-good-and-the-bad-the-right-and-the-wrong/