Blaming CO2 - We'll Roast... We'll Drown... We'll Starve... We'll Sneeze??? - Granite Grok

Blaming CO2 – We’ll Roast… We’ll Drown… We’ll Starve… We’ll Sneeze???

Alarmism has many forms- now it's pollen counts!
Alarmism has many forms-
now it’s pollen counts!
There is a certain alarmist style of reporting where any series of unfortunate events will be blamed on Global Cooling, er, Global Warming, er, Climate Change, Oh, Heck – Let’s just blame CO2 directly!

In that vein, we now have an amazing piece from USA Today blaming allergy season on CO2!

They failed to convince us that we could bring about a new Ice Age (although Russian scientists think it might happen naturally); they failed to scare us over Global Warming (simultaneous rising sea levels and crop failures due to drought) because temperatures stopped rising, they got even less traction trying to blame everything from snow to heatwaves on “Climate Change”, and now, running out of reasons to make us afraid of CO2, we’re going to sneeze to death because plants are growing better. REALLY. You can’t make this stuff up, although it seems that the warmists do just that!  

A quick recap: Not only have we had the same hacks, like Al Gore and James Hansen, doing the rounds ever since the “new ice age” scare of the ’70s, telling us that humans are to blame for all the planet’s ills, and that we should be controlled by big(ger) government, but they’ve been discredited over and over when their predictions fail to materialize, sometimes spectacularly.

Attempts to blame CO2 increases for Global Warming fizzled as better studies revealed: The Sun is the biggest driver of global temperature; Water Vapor has a much bigger effect, and it mostly acts to stabilize temperature (negative feedback), CO2 is a “lagging indicator” – IE CO2 levels FOLLOW global temperature changes, rather than causing them. And then the temperature stopped rising…… more than 15 years ago.

Next, it was Climate Change, meaning that notwithstanding the global history of climate variations, any change from the currently ‘perfect’ climate was not to be tolerated (Liberal Tolerance again), and that humans and CO2 MUST be to blame. Climate Change was responsible for extreme weather events….. until it was shown that there were less such events, just better publicized to make their point.

Getting desperate to demonstrate why the increasingly unpopular drive to restrict our access to cheap, carbon-based, energy (via the EPA and the Interior Department), was still in our best interests, the Chicken Littles are clucking a new warning.

Yessirree Bob! After the skeptics had begun to get traction with the idea that a small increase in CO2 might actually help plants grow better (the Carbon Cycle, don’tcha know), now its time for….. Tada!… Increased CO2 is responsible for your allergies, because…. it helps the plants grow better!

Most average people have observed over their lives, a correlation between weather (the right proportions of rain and sun, not too much wind) and the quality of the blossom season, the vividness of the leaves in fall, and, yes, pollen counts. But such experience and common sense is not good enough for these guys – here’s an excerpt from USA Today’s article (emphasis mine):

“I noticed something changing.” says Leonard Bielory, an allergy and immunology expert at Rutgers University’s Center for Environmental Prediction. He’s been counting pollen in New Jersey for 27 years and initially wondered whether the spike was because of El Niño, a warm ocean current.

“I saw a trend as I did an analysis,” he says, noting his counts in the past five years have been double that of any prior five-year period. In fact, this year’s levels are the highest since he began. Bielory expects they could increase 20% to 30% by 2020.

He says last year’s Superstorm Sandy exacerbated the problem by soaking the soil with so much water that even though April was dry, pollen has reached record local levels.

See, on the one hand, just like Algore’s hockey stick graph, (pant, pant) it’s higher than ever – must be a trend, and then they contradict themselves with the observation that weather patterns make a huge difference. Which is it, guys?

What do you think? I think that blaming CO2 for hayfever is the ultimate in grasping at straws!

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