Carbon Dioxide : The Good News
By Paul Homewood
http://www.thegwpf.com/climate-doomsayers-ignore-benefits-of-carbon-dioxide/
Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.
Pointing to estimates that the current value of the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect on global crop production is about $140 billion a year, he notes that this additional production has helped reduce hunger and advance human well-being.
But the benefits go much further than this. It is not only crops that benefit from this “carbon dioxide fertilisation effect”: almost without exception, the wild places of the Earth have become greener in recent decades, .largely as a direct result of carbon dioxide increases. In fact, it has been shown that carbon dioxide can increase plants’ water-use efficiency too, making them more resilient to drought, so that there is a double benefit in arid parts of the world.
And as Dr Goklany points out: “Unlike the claims of future global warming disasters these benefits are firmly established and are being felt now. Yet despite this the media overlook the good news and the public remain in the dark. My report should begin to restore a little balance.”
In a powerful foreword to the report, the world-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson FRS endorses Goklany’s conclusions and provides a devastating analysis of why “a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts”, arguing that “the thinking of politicians and scientists about controversial issues today is still tribal”.
The full report is here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Excellent piece! I refuse to refer to “greenhouse gases” unless they are inside a greenhouse. This terminology has been crafted by those wishing to put forth the notion that there is something unnatural and evil about them. My college physiology text properly identifies them as “atmospheric gases.”
His points on the balance maintained are just spot-on and common sense (something no longer in favor). I remember back in the later 1960’s that botanists began wringing their hands over the destruction of the “rain forests.” At the time I was in graduate school and sort of went along with the pronouncements as sounding logical. However, not too long afterwards it was discovered that the CO2 released by cutting and burning in the forests by people with the unnatural desire to eat, was happily being slurped up by the Arctic tundra. I jumped off that bandwagon and have been a skeptic on things “environmental” ever since.
Finally, have these environmental bozos ever considered that the CO2 in coal, etc. had to be present to be incorporated into the fossil materials? It was not until the Devonian that there was enough atmosphere to block ultraviolet and the first land plants appeared. Prior to that, all life was in water as it would have been fried otherwise. Plants went from pin-sized to tree-sized and from spores to the first seeds during that time–granted, a long time. The swamps which produced coal in the Carboniferous were hot, hot, hot and full of tree-sized plants which today are represented by our small horsetails, scouring rushes and ground pines.
YES SIR, CO2 IS THE GAS OF LIFE!
The rest is, -to express in a polite way-, just cow’s manure (actually very useful for life too)