More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to accelerated growth of certain tree species

(NaturalNews) Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota at Morris have found that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have led to the rapid growth of certain tree species. The quaking aspen, a popular North America deciduous tree, has seen a 50 percent acceleration in growth over the past 50 years due to increased CO2 levels.

Trees are necessary climate regulators since they process carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Humans process oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, working harmoniously with natural plant life to maintain proper atmospheric composition. Since natural forests represent about 30 percent of the earth's surface, they are highly effective at segregating greenhouse gases.

The quaking aspen is a vibrant, dominant tree found in both Canada and the United States. It is considered to be a "foundation species", meaning that it helps dictate the dynamics of the plant and animal communities that surround it. Roughly 42 million acres in Canada and 6.5 million acres in Wisconsin and Minnesota are composed of aspen trees.

Elevated levels of CO2 will naturally lead to increased plant growth since CO2 is a precursor to plant food. Tree-ring analyses verified that aspen trees have been growing at an increasingly accelerated pace over the years because of this phenomenon.

Because accelerated growth was not seen in other tree species like oak and pine, scientists admit they will have to further investigate the issue. Similarly, drier regions where the trees were found did not experience the same rapid growth rates as those found in the wetter regions.

Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

An interesting side effect of increased carbon emissions by human activity is that plants will grow more quickly. CO2 is to plants as oxygen is to humans, so the more CO2 is in the atmosphere, the more quickly many plants can grow.

Of course, plants produce oxygen as the "waste" product of their respiration, and that's a poison to other plants, so there's a natural balancing effect that keeps oxygen and CO2 levels in balance over the long haul.

This is why greenhouse gases are called "greenhouse gases", by the way -- because they turn the planet into a really effective greenhouse where plants grow like crazy. Of course, the clear-cutting of rainforest in the Amazon (and elsewhere) kills any chance of those regions taking part in that accelerated plant growth. Even in a high-CO2 environment, human beings can destroy plant life with bulldozers.

It's interesting that plants and humans breathe the same air but extract very different chemical elements from it: Humans need oxygen while plants need carbon dioxide. For both species to survive, the air needs to contain both chemicals in balance. Currently, the oxygen content of the air is roughly around 20% (and falling).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...

EPA's "endangerment finding" allows Big Government to regulate carbon emissions

(NaturalNews) Carbon dioxide is a threat to human life, says the EPA under the direction of the Obama Administration. With this declaration, the agency has bypassed Congress and can now begin to regulate CO2 as a toxic substance.

The timing of this declaration was obviously planned to coincide with the Copenhagen climate summit: With the EPA now operating with some fangs, Obama can wheel and deal in Denmark with the credibility of some political weight behind his words. But is the sudden declaration warranted? Is it backed by real science?

Lisa Jackson of the EPA explains the decision "relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data." But thanks to the recent discovery of leaked emails from climate change scientists (ClimateGate), I'm beginning to wonder how much of that scientific data was distorted in order to achieve a particular political goal.

Green living = population control?

For the record, I've been working hard to spread awareness about reducing our carbon footprint and living sustainably. And unlike many who just talk about it, I'm knee-deep in living it in Ecuador, where I grow roughly 80% of my diet from my own garden while living increasingly "green" off the local land. But even as a green living advocate, I'm more than little concerned how Big Government might twist these climate laws to encroach upon the rights and freedoms of the People.

If CO2 is regulated, for example, it means the very gas you exhale will be considered a hazard to life on Earth. Thus, regulating CO2 could be a sneaky way to start our nation down the road of population control or even population reduction. When a person reaches the age of 65, for example, and they're about to retire and collect social security, they might then be seen as a carbon-producing financial burden, and mass euthanasia programs could begin to be seriously considered. (This isn't science fiction. Nursing home patients are already being routinely euthanized with psychiatric drugs and painkillers right now...)

Of course, most carbon comes not from the respiration of human beings, but rather from the vehicles they drive and the carbon miles underlying the products they consume. There's no question that Americans, in particular, are extremely wasteful when it comes to energy usage. They drive huge, over-powered vehicles for hours a day as a way of life, and they purchase food and other products that have burned up gallons of fossil fuels just to arrive at the local stores. The American way of life is, without debate, extremely wasteful of energy resources. (In most cities, it is also ridiculously non-sustainable...)

There's a lot that can be done to reduce energy consumption in America and therefore reduce the nation's CO2 emissions, but at what cost, exactly? What will Americans have to give up in order to meet the new emissions goals?

The senseless wasting of energy must stop

That idea frightens a lot of people, but on the other hand, as someone who now lives permanently in a developing nation, I can say with rare authenticity that living in America causes you to become addicted to the luxuries of easy energy. There's a whole lot of room for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint, but it means giving up some of the luxuries we all tend to take for granted. Driving to Blockbuster to return a rented DVD, for example, is just plain stupid. Why burn gas to push a 4,000-pound vehicle around town to return a 6-oz. piece of circular plastic? It makes no sense.

Building new homes with poor insulation makes no sense, either. And yet the building codes all across America still favor the short-term profits of home construction companies rather than long-term sustainability and energy efficiency.

For many years, I lived in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is a desert, with roughly 330 days of sunlight a year. It's the perfect environment for a rooftop-mounted solar hot water heater that would replace all the gas and electricity used to heat hot water for local homes. But how many homes in Tucson are built with rooftop solar hot water heaters? Virtually none. It's the same story in Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego and even Los Angeles. KB Home and other builders keep erecting these cookie-cutter homes with no renewable energy components whatsoever. And why? Because it makes the homes a thousand bucks cheaper to sell to someone.

This kind of short-sighted energy nonsense has got to stop in America. Even without the climate change debate, it's still senseless to go on burning up the world's fossil fuels when there's so much renewable energy available for the taking if we only had the foresight to think beyond the next fiscal quarter. There's enough spare sunlight in the deserts of Arizona to power the entire nation with solar, by the way. With enough solar panels, Arizona could position itself as the Middle East of America.

I would much rather see America embrace renewable energy (and some commonsense consumption modifications) than have Big Brother wade into the fray with carbon limits and punitive fines. Government is a crude weapon for social change. It only knows how to criminalize behavior it doesn't like. It's terrible at educating consumers and businesses to change in responsible, sustainable ways. My concern with the EPA's decision today is that instead of getting a push towards a sustainable future powered with more renewable energy, we're going to get a new layer of energy tyranny that smothers the freedoms Americans are already fighting desperately to preserve.

Ask yourself this question: What has Big Government done well?

Big Government = Big failures

Think about Big Government has done for you lately: The H1N1 vaccine program was a total fiasco. The national taxation system is a paperwork nightmare. Health care is a complete joke. The Wall Street investment system is a government-sponsored casino that favors the rich. The prison system is a disaster. Public education has fallen to new lows in both funding and innovation. The war in Afghanistan drags on as a failed imperialist catastrophe. Agricultural policy, farm subsidies and the regulation of food and drugs are all completely off course, causing far more harm than good.

Now imagine Big Government running a carbon trading system -- or even personal carbon footprint limits that result in you receiving heavy fines if you exceed the government-mandated personal quota. This is precisely what could happen under a new "energy tyranny" that has just been initiated by the EPA and the Obama Administration.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for reducing our carbon emissions and living more sustainably. I just don't like to be told what to do under the threat of being fined, arrested or imprisoned.

Do I have a better plan? Actually, I do. Implement my radical, money-saving health reform proposals (www.HealthRevolutionPetition.org) and use the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to invest in solar power generation centers that blanket the nation's deserts. Using CSP technology (Concentrated Solar Power) -- or even some of the more innovative stirling engine / solar concentrator inventions -- we could provide power for the entire nation for generations to come. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concen...)

Or end the war in Afghanistan (which, strangely, Obama the anti-war President has now chosen to escalate even more), bring the troops home and spend the military budget building solar arrays that power America. Why fight for oil at a million dollars a year per soldier (which is what the war is costing, astonishingly) (http://rawstory.com/2009/10/us-spen...) when you can spend a fraction of that building energy sovereignty right here on American soil?

The solutions to our energy problems and our CO2 problems are found in the same place: Renewable energy technology that exists right now, today! Solar and wind really can provide all the electrical power our country needs, and with electric vehicles coming on line over the next few years, we could see a massive shift away from combustion engines and toward electric vehicles powered by solar energy delivered through the power lines. This isn't radical stuff. It's doable right now.

But if there's one thing that I've learned about Big Government, it's that innovation is the enemy of the status quo. Government rarely likes to innovate. It's more interested in controlling people, and declaring CO2 to be a harmful substance could be just the pretext our bloated, indebted and morally inept national government needs to unleash a new era of carbon controls that suffocate the American people.

Let's reduce our carbon footprint, YES! But let's do it in a way that doesn't increase the reach and power of a government that's already so large and dangerous it poses a far greater threat to the livelihood of the people than climate change ever has.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/co...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126...

ClimateGate scandal demonstrates intellectual protectionism of modern scientists

(NaturalNews) The inconvenient release of private email conversations among climate change scientists has been a boon for climate change skeptics. What emerges from the leaked emails is a depiction of a group of scientists who practice "intellectual protectionism" -- meaning they know they're right and they'll do anything to protect their beliefs, even if it means hiding or manipulating data.

Sound familiar? Scientists in the pharmaceutical industry have been practicing this for decades. If you think the ClimateGate emails are revealing, just imagine what kind of similar emails are flying around between Big Pharma scientists who routinely manipulate study data and commit scientific fraud in the name of medicine. Time and time again, we see revelations of manipulated clinical trials where data was intentionally distorted in order to make a dangerous, useless drug appear to be safe and effective.

What ClimateGate scientists and Big Pharma scientists have in common is that they have both abandoned the core principles of good science in their quest to be right. Rather than asking questions of nature and humbly listening to the answers provided by the data, these scientists have staked out a position and decided to defend that position at all costs -- even if it requires hiding or distorting data!

That approach is entirely unscientific, of course. In my mind, it now puts much of the recent global warming science in the same category as Big Pharma's research: Pure quackery.

As Christopher Booker explains in The Telegraph, "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...)

Claiming to save the planet is no excuse for scientific fraud

Global warming may, indeed, be a real phenomenon. But trying to "prove" it by conspiring to manipulate the data in order to be right is absolutely the wrong way to go about studying the issue. In fact, these ClimateGate revelations have soundly discredited much of the global warming scientific community to the point where whatever these people say from now on simply cannot be trusted.

And that's a shame because the question remains: What if the global warming scientists are really right? What if they're right for all the wrong reasons, and they let their egos and their professional pride get in the way of conducting real science, thereby discrediting the very notion they were attempting to prove? That's a possibility we would still do well to consider.

Yet, from their released emails, it's quite clear these scientists were manipulating data to make the "science" fit their beliefs. They weren't focused solely on the real facts; they were interested in forwarding their climate change theories using any means necessary -- including scientific trickery.

What's truly sad about all this -- both in the climate change community and the pharmaceutical community -- is that real science has seemingly been replaced by pseudoscientific quackery. I've known for a long time that you can't trust scientists who work for pharmaceutical companies because they tend to distort their findings to support their employer. Now learning that a similar approach to junk science was apparently pursued by climate change scientists is more than a little disconcerting. It makes me wonder: Are there any honest scientists left anywhere?

The structure of scientific revolutions

It seems that in all realms of science, egos are more important than observational data. Whether you're dealing with astronomy, oceanography, anthropology or biology, every scientist wants to be right, and most will do whatever it takes to defend their proclaimed theories and beliefs. This is why it remains so ridiculously difficult to penetrate the minds of modern doctors with facts about vitamin D and cancer, for example: These "scientific thinkers" have already decided what to believe, and they'll defend those beliefs at all costs, even in the face of strong evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

What I've come to realize in all this is that many of today's scientists aren't scientific thinkers. They're really just followers of their own private cult. Some "scientists" belong to the Cult of Pharmacology, and they believe pharmaceuticals are the answer to everything. Others belong to the Cult of Climatology, where scientific evidence is replaced with "faith" beliefs that are not allowed to be questioned. These micro-cults of scientific "truth" explain why science usually doesn't advance until a whole generation of scientists either retires or expires.

It all brings us back to the amazing book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this book explains, science almost never advances based entirely on new research, new ideas and new data. Instead, these new understandings collide with a wall of ego-driven resistance from the established scientific community. At times, such new ideas may linger for decades or even centuries before finally being seriously considered by the scientific community and then adopted as "truth." The classic example of this is the "Earth is the center of the universe" belief that was eventually replaced with the current sun-centric solar system model -- but not before many scientific thinkers were condemned (and even put to death) for their "preposterous" belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

In reality, modern science advances much like vomit -- in sudden wretched heaves that are both painful and revealing. The modern scientist is far more interested in being right than in being humbly informed about the mysteries of nature, and this makes much of so-called science more of a laughing matter than anything to be taken seriously. There are, no doubt, many very good scientists operating today who truly take to heart the Scientific Method and who avoid entangling their egos in their work, but I'm coming to discover that the number of such scientists may be far smaller than I had hoped.

In my mind, all of this further discredits the very idea that science is a reliable pathway to knowledge. There are many ways to glean knowledge about the world around us, and science is only one of them. Other methods included meditation, "communing" with nature, spiritual study or even embarking on spirit journeys with the help of plant medicines. Western science has given us much in terms of practical discoveries in fields like electricity, chemistry and physics, but it has utterly failed to provide us with answers on the things that really count: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of human consciousness? What is the human soul?

None of these questions, it seems, will ever be answered by an ego-driven, profit-focused scientific community that would rather be right than enlightened.

Three questions we need to be asking

In order to know what's truly happening with human-caused climate change, we need to get accurate answers to the following three questions:

Question #1) Are CO2 emissions on the rise? And by how much? (The answer to this is clearly yes. This part isn't being debated.)

Question #2) Will high CO2 levels in the atmosphere cause global warming? If so, what will be the climate effects at different CO2 levels? (This is the part being debated.)

Question #3) What can we do to prevent devastating climate change from occurring? (This is also being heavily debated.)

In my mind, there's no question that what we dump into the air affects the climate in some way, but as I'm not a climate scientist, I must rely on others to determine what levels of carbon dioxide are correlated with observable climate effects (such as a change in atmospheric temperature or lack thereof). What I've learned from the ClimateGate scandal is that I really can't trust these scientists to tell the truth about their findings, and that leaves me in a position of having more questions than ever before.

It won't change my behavior, though. I'll still engage in recycling. I'll continue with my plans to install solar panels to power my house. I'll keep planting trees and growing most of my own food locally. Regardless of who's right about ClimateGate, we all have a responsibility to reduce our footprint on this planet, or we may someday discover some other environmental tsunami rising up to haunt us in ways we may have never imagined.

The ClimateGate scientists may have made complete fools of themselves, but I believe we must still practice ecologically-sound "green living" in our own way, each and every day, to the best of our abilities. In other words, don't let the egos of a small group of scientists distract you from the very real need to protect the future of life on our planet. Reduce your own environmental footprint in ways that you can. Conserve and protect what we have on this planet, and we may yet have a planet left for our children a few generations down the line.

Remember: Just because these scientists manipulated the data doesn't mean we all have free license to endlessly pollute the planet. If these scientists really were hiding data indicating global warming isn't as bad as we thought, that would only be a blessing because it would mean we have more time than we thought to reduce the eco-footprint of human life on Earth (hopefully without invoking nefarious Big Brother population control measures...)

It will be fascinating to see how this story develops. We'll continue to cover it here on NaturalNews.com.

Sources for this story include
http://www.smh.com.au/world/univers...
http://features.csmonitor.com/polit...
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/82...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/climate...
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/1...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...