Essay by Eric Worrall
The Trump obsessed media is still talking about Trump and Elon Musk dissing climate tropes.
The new wave of climate claptrap
Misleading, misinformed or just plain baffling utterances continue to gush forth in the face of an increasingly evident problem.
Pilita Clark Columnist
You can sum up the world in just one word today: hot.
Powerful heatwaves have struck every continent over the past year. At least 10 countries have recorded daily temperatures above 50 degrees in more than one place. Wildfires are scorching unusually large areas of the globe and coral reefs have been hit by the fourth global bleaching event on record.
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But last week, in a conversation on his X platform with Donald Trump, Musk said the climate risk wasn’t actually as high as many thought before launching into a mystifying explanation for why there was loads of time left to tackle it.
If the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere keeps rising from today’s average levels of around 420 parts per million to above 1000 ppm, “you start getting headaches and nausea”, he told Trump. But since we’re only adding about 2 ppm of CO₂ a year, “we still have quite a bit of time” and “we don’t need to rush”.
This is claptrap of the highest order. The heat, flooding and fire disasters we’re seeing with the amount of warming that accumulated CO₂ has already driven will be paltry compared to what would happen if levels rose to anything like 1000 ppm.
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Thankfully we have proof the claim a 1000ppm CO2 world would be a fire ravaged disaster zone is utter nonsense. From the hothouse world of the PETM, 5-8C hotter than today, estimated CO2 levels around 1500ppm
Fire and ecosystem change in the Arctic across the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum
Author links open overlay panelElizabeth H. Denis a1, Nikolai Pedentchouk b, Stefan Schouten cd, Mark Pagani e2, Katherine H. Freeman a
Volume 467, 1 June 2017, Pages 149-156
Highlights
- •Increased PAH abundances relative to plant biomarkers suggests increased fire.
- •Angiosperms increased relative to gymnosperms based on pollen and plant biomarkers.
- •Wetter and hotter conditions preceded increased angiosperms and greater fire.
- •During the PETM in the Arctic, climate-driven changes in ecology increased fire.
- •Fire may have attenuated the effects of increases in plant biomass on carbon cycle.
Abstract
Fire has been an important component of ecosystems on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Fire can affect vegetation distribution, the carbon cycle, and climate. The relationship between climate and fire is complex, in large part because of a key role of vegetation type. Here, we evaluate regional scale fire–climate relationships during a past global warming event, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), in order to understand how vegetation influenced the links between climate and fire occurrence in the Arctic region. To document concurrent changes in climate, vegetation, and fire occurrence, we evaluated biomarkers, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons(PAHs), terpenoids, and alkanes, from the PETM interval at a marine depositional site (IODP site 302, the Lomonosov Ridge) in the Arctic Ocean.
Biomarker, fossil, and isotope evidence from site 302 indicates that terrestrial vegetation changed during the PETM. The abundance of the C29 n-alkanes, pollen, and the ratio of leaf-wax n-alkanes relative to diterpenoids all indicate that proportional contributions from angiosperm vegetation increased relative to that from gymnosperms. These changes accompanied increased moisture transport to the Arctic and higher temperatures, as recorded by previously published proxy records. We find that PAH abundances were elevated relative to total plant biomarkers throughout the PETM, and suggest that fire occurrence increased relative to plant productivity. The fact that fire frequency or prevalence may have increased during wetter Arctic conditions suggests that changes in fire occurrence were not a simple function of aridity, as is commonly conceived. Instead, we suggest that the climate-driven ecological shift to angiosperm-dominated vegetation was what led to increased fire occurrence. Potential increases in terrestrial plant biomass that arose from warm, wet, and high CO2 conditions were possibly attenuated by biomass burning associated with compositional changes in the plant community.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012821X17301577
Hangon, didn’t that study just say fires increased in the PETM?
Yes, but read it again. The fires increased, but only in proportion to changes in vegetation. The change of fire risk was because the warmth and elevated CO2 of the PETM changed the type of vegetation growing in the Arctic.
Angiosperms = trees, and other woody flowering plants. In place of today’s Arctic tundra, the Arctic of the PETM was covered in trees.
The point is, even if a temperature excursion as extreme as the PETM were to occur, the fire risk could be managed by adopting the fire mitigation policies of the state to to the south of your current home. There will be no CO2 driven fiery apocalypse, even if CO2 levels hit 1000ppm or higher. The only changes to fire risk would be driven by alterations to the types of plants which are growing, and improvements in growing conditions – all of which could be mitigated by adopting the fire management practices of places which already enjoy such conditions.
Pilita Clark, you are supposed to be a journalist for a responsible financial paper. You owe it to your readers to do a little research, before publishing wild, “claptrap” claims about global warming.
The Trump / Musk interview is available here
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