Type 3 climate change deniers

[billvon 2,995]

For a while I have been making a distinction between climate change skeptics and climate change deniers. Skeptics are people who are skeptical about some aspect of climate change - for example, whether or not Atlantic hurricanes will become more intense as the climate warms, or whether future amplifications will be primarily positive or neutral. And indeed, there is a lot of discussion within climate science circles on such topics, with research being done, papers being published and talks being given.

That's not the approach that a climate change denier takes. The fundamental characteristic of a climate change denier is that they deny everything that has to do with climate change. The details of what they deny changes from day to day, but the one recurring theme is denial.

Examples:
Skeptic: "As the climate warms, some storms may indeed get more intense - but others may not form at all due to less temperature differential between the north pole and equator."

Denier: "The climate's not warming! The data is all doctored. Anyway, CO2 is greening the planet. And see? Look above! Even scientists say that storms won't form!"

That being said, deniers often concentrate their denials along three or four general categories:

Type 1: warming denial. "The planet's not warming!"
Type 2: greenhouse gas denial. "OK so the planet's warming but we have nothing to do with it!"
Type 3: denial of effects. "OK so the planet's warming, and maybe we did it, but it will be all good."
Type 4: denial of mitigations. "OK so it won't be good, but it's too late to do anything at all."

Most deniers actually change types based on what Wattsupwiththat or Breitbart article they most recently read. While this often leads to statements that aren't even self-consistent (i.e. "the planet isn't warming! And the warming will all be good!") they are consistent from the point of view of denial.

One of the more common types I have seen recently is the type 3 denier. Their claims:

"CO2 is greening the planet!"
"Plants like CO2 and warmth, so more plants will grow and absorb all the CO2."
"A warmer planet means more crops and more food for starving people!"

Some actual statements from people here:
"Also he doesn't address the observed greening of the planet."
"They predicted less food production, we have more. They predicted desertification, we got global greening."
" 'the benefits of increasing CO2 and modest warming are clearer than ever, and they are supported by dramatic satellite images of a greening Earth. ' "

So warming and more CO2 will bring benefits and greening, rather than the bad effects those stupid clueless scientists claim. How do we test that theory? You can't just heat up one area of the Earth with big heaters and see what happens.

However, you can wait until there's a spate of unusually warm weather and see what happens to the vegetation within the area that's been warmed. If plants grow and CO2 levels drop that would tend to confirm that warming plus CO2 does indeed have a second order effect of mitigating the warming by absorbing more CO2.

Fortunately, such an event recently occurred - an El Nino that brought consistently warmer temperatures for an entire year to parts of the world. Even more fortunately, we now have a satellite that can see CO2 levels - down to the scale of CO2 emitted from towns and cities.

So what did we see during the El Nino in areas that were consistently warmer over the course of a year? From a story in the Verge, reporting on a study in Science:

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An extra 2.5 gigatons of CO2 was released into the air compared to 2011, when conditions were normal, one of the Science papers reported. That extra carbon . . came from tropical areas in South America, Africa, and Asia — where plants all reacted differently. In South America, the plants’ growth was stunted by drought, causing them to vacuum up less CO2 than usual. In Africa, the heat caused dead plants to decompose more quickly, releasing high amounts of CO2. And in Asia, drought and heat caused forest fires, which also pumped huge quantities of carbon into the air.
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So the heat in all three cases caused more CO2 to be released - through stunted plant growth, fires and faster decomposition.

This certainly isn't the "end of the story" but it does strongly suggest that warmer temperatures are reducing the ability of plants to absorb CO2, and that will in turn speed the increases in concentrations of that greenhouse gas.