The gas everyone loves to hate

Leighton Steward: Great news for earth's ecosystems
By: Leighton Steward
Recent news has been all bad for the International Panel on Climate Change and the former gold standard for global temperatures at East Anglia University.
Leaders of the organizations have been less than forthright regarding these facts: "The climate science is not settled," that assumptions in models used to "predict" catastrophic future warming may have been wrong, that the rapidity of glacier loss was overstated by multiples of years (initially denied), that there has been a tendency to leave out inconvenient scientific data in IPCC's all-important summary for policymakers, that temperatures today are possibly not unprecedented, and that there has been no statistically significant global warming in the last 15 years.
These admissions, prompted by information generated from 3,000 internal e-mails at East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, have shaken the warming community to its roots (even the leader of Greenpeace of the United Kingdom is appalled).
There is, however, great news for planet Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms, including humanity. With these admissions that the data and conclusions may be suspect, scientists and policymakers should now realize that carbon dioxide may not be a significant cause of climate change and that the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere may be beneficial to Earth, as it already has been since the beginning of the industrial revolution around 1860.
Thousands of real field and laboratory experiments by the agricultural community indicate that Earth's plants have experienced an increased growth of about 12 percent and Earth's forest an increase of about 18 percent.
In fact, these peer-reviewed studies show that an addition of 300 parts per million of CO2 to Earth's existing 387 ppm would result in average plant growth of 35 percent and growth of trees by 50 percent.
Other benefits include the fact that plants require less water to grow as large in a CO2- enriched atmosphere. This makes plants drought-tolerant as evidenced by plants today encroaching onto the deserts. Plants also become more tolerant of many environmental stresses.
It quickly became obvious that people, scientists and politicians were not aware of the astonishing benefits of CO2. Because there is not a single instance of CO2 being a pollutant and my own research of the literature indicating that there is no convincing evidence of CO2-caused global climate change, I gave some public talks and found that objective people were very interested in having a summary of these benefits to weigh against what they were being fed by proponents of CO2-caused warming.
This led to my becoming chairman and spokesman for a 501 c(3) organization, PlantsNeedCO2.org, and a 501 c(4) advocacy foundation, CO2IsGreen.org.
People easily grasp the magnitude of the benefits of more CO2 but invariably ask, "But isn't CO2 causing global warming?"
While climate science is very complex, these observations deny that conclusion. First is the fact that detailed studies of ice cores prove that changes in CO2 levels follow changes in temperature by several hundreds of years.
Secondly, a law of physics shows that CO2's ability to absorb more heat declines very rapidly, logarithmically, as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. Thirdly, empirical (real) studies of current and historical climates do not support the hypothesis that CO2 is or has been a major cause of climate change.
Check it out on PlantsNeedCO2.org. You will soon realize the amazing benefits that additional CO2 can bring to Earth's ecosystems, habitats, food supplies and human health.
More CO2 will truly "green" the Earth, while the cries from extremists to actually reduce atmospheric CO2 would result in a "browning" of Earth and death or increased misery to hundreds of millions of people living on the edge of starvation.
H. Leighton Steward, a Texas geologist, is also the author of two best-selling books challenging conventional wisdom -- "Fire, Ice and Paradise" on global warming, and "Sugar Busters" (with Morrison, Bethea, et al.) on nutrition.