The Rate Debate Slowing

Alt Cause - Forest Sinks

Ronald Reagan's infamous claim that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles" contained a grain of truth. In warm weather, trees release volatile chemicals that act as catalysts for smog. But the Gipper didn't mention another point that's even more likely to make nature lovers blanch. When it comes to fighting climate change, it's more effective to treat forests like crops than like majestic monuments to nature. Over its lifetime, a tree shifts from being a vacuum cleaner for atmospheric carbon to an emitter. A tree absorbs roughly 1,500 pounds of CO2 in its first 55 years. After that, its growth slows, and it takes in less carbon. Left untouched, it ultimately rots or burns and all that CO2 gets released. Last year, the Canadian government commissioned a study to determine the quantity of carbon sequestered by the country's woodlands, which account for a tenth of global forests. It hoped to use the CO2-gathering power of 583 million acres of woods to offset its Kyoto Protocol-mandated responsibility to cut greenhouse gas emissions. No such luck. The report found that during many years, Canadian forests actually give up more carbon from decomposing wood than they lock down in new growth.

No Extinction - Empirics

Climate change does not lead to extinction- empirically proven

Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2012 (Craig, PhD in geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U Nebraska) Plant Responses to Significant and Rapid Global Warming http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N24/EDIT.php

In an impressive and enlightening review of the subject, Willis and MacDonald (2011) begin by noting that key research efforts have focused on extinction scenarios derived from "a suite of predictive species distribution models (e.g., Guisan and Thuiller, 2005)" - which are most often referred to as bioclimatic envelope models - that "predict current and future range shifts and estimate the distances and rates of movement required for species to track the changes in climate and move into suitable new climate space." And they write that one of the most-cited studies of this type - that of Thomas et al. (2004) - "predicts that, on the basis of mid-range climatic warming scenarios for 2050, up to 37% of plant species globally will be committed to extinction owing to lack of suitable climate space." In contrast, the two researchers say that "biotic adaptation to climate change has been considered much less frequently." This phenomenon - which is sometimes referred to as evolutionary resilience - they describe as "the ability of populations to persist in their current location and to undergo evolutionary adaptation in response to changing environmental conditions (Sgro et al., 2010)." And they note that this approach to the subject "recognizes that ongoing change is the norm in nature and one of the dynamic processes that generates and maintains biodiversity patterns and processes," citing MacDonald et al. (2008) and Willis et al. (2009). The aim of Willis and MacDonald's review, therefore, was to examine the effects of significant and rapid warming on earth's plants during several previous intervals of the planet's climatic history that were as warm as, or even warmer than, what climate alarmists typically predict for the next century. These intervals included the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the Eocene climatic optimum, the mid-Pliocene warm interval, the Eemian interglacial, and the Holocene. And it is important to note that this approach, in contrast to the approach typically used by climate alarmists, relies on empirical (as opposed to theoretical) data-based (as opposed to model-based), reconstructions (as opposed to projections) of the past (as opposed to the future). And what were the primary findings of the two researchers? As they describe them, in their own words, "persistence and range shifts (migrations) seem to have been the predominant terrestrial biotic response (mainly of plants) to warmer intervals in Earth's history," while "the same responses also appear to have occurred during intervals of rapid climate change." In addition, they make a strong point of noting that "evidence for global extinctions or extinctions resulting from reduction of population sizes on the scale predicted for the next century owing to loss of suitable climate space (Thomas et al., 2004) is not apparent." In fact, they state that sometimes an actual increase in local biodiversity is observed, the case for which we lay out in Section II (Physiological Reasons for Rejecting the CO2-Induced Global Warming Extinction Hypothesis) of our Major Report The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming Decimate Earth's Biosphere? Read it and rejoice!

No extinction- their models don’t account for TGP

Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso et al 2011 (Craig, PhD in geography @Arizona State, M.S. in Agronomy from U Nebraska) Transgenerational Plasticity: A Third Way of Adapting to Climate Change http://co2science.org/articles/V15/N16/EDIT.php

In introducing their intriguing new study, two U.S. scientists, Salinas and Munch (2012), write that historical attempts to address the issue of organismal responses to changing temperature have focused almost exclusively on evolutionary change and phenotypic plasticity; but they turn their attention to a third way: transgenerational plasticity or TGP. This phenomenon, as they describe it, "occurs when the environment experienced by the parents prior to fertilization directly translates, without DNA sequence alteration, into significant changes in the shape of offspring reaction norms (Fox and Mousseau, 1998), resulting in a significant interaction between parental and offspring environment effects." Such effects have been observed in many traits of several species; yet they note that "TGP in thermal growth physiology has never been demonstrated for vertebrates," which is consequently what they set out to do for sheepshead minnows (Cyprinodon variegatus), a small fish that is common to nearshore marine and estuarine waters along the east coast of the United States and throughout the Caribbean. Working with fish they had raised from the egg stage to adults in aquaria they had maintained at constant temperatures of either 24, 29 or 34°C, Salinas and Munch allowed the soon-to-become parent fish to spawn, after which they collected the newly fertilized eggs from each of the three temperature treatments and allowed a third of each group to develop within each of a new set of aquaria maintained at the same three standard temperatures, during which time the growth rates of the new sets of juveniles were determined. So what did they learn? The two researchers report that offspring from high (34°C) and low (24°C) temperature-raised parents grew best at high and low temperature, respectively, "suggesting an adaptive response," with growth rates differing by as much as 32% (0.60 vs. 0.46 mm/day, when both sets of offspring were maintained at 34°C). And in discussing this result, Salinas and Munch say that the rate of adaptive response change that they observed "is roughly two orders of magnitude greater than the median rate of phenotypic change found in a review of the subject (Hendry and Kinnison, 1999)." In terms of the range of applicability of the TGP phenomenon, the two scientists say that it has so far "only been demonstrated for milkweed bugs (Groeters and Dingle, 1988), butterflies (Steigenga and Fischer, 2007), and thale cress (Blodner et al., 2007; Whittle et al., 2009)," but they note that "in all cases, offspring growth is maximized at the temperature experienced by the parents." As for the importance of TGP, Salinas and Munch write that it "may allow for a rapid response to environmental changes," citing Bossdorf et al. (2008), while specifically noting that "changes in precipitation may be counteracted via TGP in desiccation tolerance in invertebrates (Yoder et al., 2006) or drought tolerance in plants (Sultan et al., 2009)," and more especially noting that "higher CO2 concentrations have been shown to elicit a TGP response in three plant species (Lau et al., 2008) and to alter predator-induced TGP responses in aphids (Mondor et al., 2004)." All in all, therefore, Salinas and Munch say of this exciting new "area of active current research" that it "may qualitatively change projections for extinction risk and other climate impacts" ... and, we might add, change them for the better.

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