We at World Climate Report wholeheartedly endorse First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign to curb childhood obesity. As she has said many times, about two-thirds of American adults, and about a third of American children, are overweight or obese. The country spends $150 billion every year treating obesity-related diseases, most of which are preventable. Military officials, looking at a pool of increasingly overweight recruits, have said that the nation’s weight problem is a security issue as well as an economic one—obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.

If you are in the DC area, be sure to make a visit to the south lawn of the White House grounds where the first lady will be organically growing lots and lots of spinach (more spinach than anything else—see Figure 1)! She not only plans on growing the stuff, but she is featuring her side dish called “No Cream Creamed Spinach” which to feed six people requires two pounds of baby spinach (the recipe is at the end of our article). We are sure the Obama children just cannot get enough of her healthy spinach salad.

Figure 1. Layout of the White House vegetable garden. Note the preponderance of spinach!

Given the Obama’s focus on spinach, we decided to deliver them some wonderful news about how spinach responds to elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).

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Close your eyes. You are sitting by a fireplace, you’ve just open a bottle of vintage Port wine your friend brought back from Portugal, you’ve cracked open Al Gore’s latest book … ouch, things were actually going pretty well with the fireplace and the vintage Port!

We bring this up given some really good news for Port lovers that appeared recently in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. We realize you’ve probably read this piece already given the widespread circulation of the journal and the intense media coverage of the article? No?! Then we’ll fill you in.

WOW – looks good for sure!

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Imagine if the global annual average temperature were about 5°F colder than it is presently.

Not quite sure how to? OK, consider this: During the Little Ice Age—a period extending from about the 1500s to the mid-1800s and thought to be one of the coldest periods during the past 10,000 years or so—the earth’s average temperature may have been 2-3°F colder than present. Associated with the Little Ice Age are all sorts of human calamities—widespread crop failures, plagues, famines, population declines, glacial encroachments, etc. For a collection of descriptions of all the fun times that a colder climate brings, take a gander at the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age. After spending a few minutes there, you’ll see that these were not high times for humans.

Now, consider a temperature decline twice that much. That can’t be good.

Yet that’s apparently where we would be had human ingenuity not come along.

According to a new study just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the global climate would be about 5°F colder than present were it not for human carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

Brrr.

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Back in November, Sesame Street celebrated its 40 anniversary, and the show featured First Lady Michelle Obama talking to vegetable puppets about helping curb childhood obesity. The First Lady explained to three young children and two somewhat old muppets the logistics of planting and growing tomatoes, lettuce and carrots as part of her initiative to promote healthy eating. She mentioned that eating these vegetables can make the children big and strong. At the end of the show, the cabbage puppet told her “We think you’re great too” and then led the children in three cheers for the First Lady. Mrs. Obama said at the time of recording her appearance was “probably the best thing I’ve done so far in the White House.”

We at World Climate Report were so moved by this show that we decided to ask the vegetable puppets what would make them big and strong, and the answer we got in our exclusive interview was resoundingly … “higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)!”

There are 1,000s of articles in the professional literature showing the incredible biological benefits of CO2, so in honor of the Sesame Street’s 40th Anniversary, here is the latest on tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce and carrots.

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For many citizens in the USA, this has been a winter for the ages. From no end of storms in the Southwest to record-breaking snow in the Northeast, this has been one long winter. But in Arizona and Florida, the boys of summer are dusting off their bats and balls and spring training is now underway. Fans are flocking back to the ballparks, and our consumption of peanuts is on the rise. American will eat more than 600 million pounds of peanuts this year at ballparks around the country (and elsewhere), we will eat over 700 million pounds of peanut butter, and we will spend over four billion dollars on our peanut habit.

What’s the climate change rub? Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are enhancing peanut productivity and protecting the crop from the harmful impacts of atmospheric pollutants such as ozone. Which means more peanuts to go around. So next time you raise your hand and call out “Hey Beerman, how about a cold one and jumbo bag of peanuts!” remember that elevated atmospheric CO2 is helping to keep your bag full.

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The January 9th, 2008 issue of Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, contains a remarkable article by University of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti and Stanford co-author Rosamond Naylor. Science reputedly is the world’s most prestigious refereed science journal in the world.

Not in this case. The article is remarkably bad. A colleague of mine, looking at an advance copy asked, in all seriousness, if this was an editorial rather than a scientific paper. Sorry, I replied, it’s the real deal.

Actually it’s pretty bad science fiction. Good science fiction is at least plausible.

Battisti’s argument seems straightforward. Take all 23 of the climate models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Over a substantial portion of the moist tropics and desert subtropics, there is a 90% chance that average summer (June-August) temperatures in 2100 will exceed today’s record values, resulting in massive rises in commodity prices as a result of extreme food shortages.

You know the paper’s going to be bad from the first sentence: “The food crisis of 2006-2008 demonstrates the fragile nature of feeding the world’s human population.”

Never mentioned is that this “crisis” was largely due to a knee-jerk political reaction—huge ethanol mandates—in response to climate science alarmism. That crisis was caused by papers like this.

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In almost every essay we feature at World Climate Report, our focus is on climatic phenomena and the general disagreement between observations and what numerical models of climate tell us should be happening given the ongoing buildup of greenhouse gases. We draw heavily from the professional scientific peer-reviewed literature, and our journals of choice range from highly specialized journals in the climate community to far more generalized, but very highly respected journals such as Science and Nature.

A recent article in Science really caught our eye with the title “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change.” This article is not going to be well received by a lot of people given 1000s of websites telling us to switch to biofuels in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – it looks like those darn “unintentional consequences” are about to bite another great-sounding idea squarely in the butt.

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The latest news continues to be full of stories about global warming, and one of the constant pillars of the apocalypse is that agricultural yields will substantially decline due to higher temperatures, increased drought, spread of diseases, invasion of weeds, destruction of soil nutrients, and … you name it! We did a quick search of the internet for “Global Warming and Agriculture” and found more than 5,000,000 websites, and as we began sampling the sites, we encountered an overwhelming amount of bad news. Occasionally, we would find sarcastic comments about “growing barley in Iceland,” but overall, we found gloomy news about our agricultural future. Of course, within the first two sites visited, we learned that “the region likely to be worst affected is Africa, both because its geography makes it particularly vulnerable, and because seventy percent of the population rely on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods.”

We at World Climate Report have long questioned such a pessimistic view of our future. Literally thousands of experiments have been conducted showing that agricultural plants benefit enormously in environments of higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide – they increase their rate of photosynthesis, increase water use efficiency, and increase yields. Furthermore, hundreds of experiments have shown that many agricultural plants benefit from higher temperatures, particularly higher temperatures at night. Believe it or not, most agricultural plants benefit from less frost! With all the gloom and doom about increased drought in the future, we note that all climate models predict increased precipitation on a global scale with little ability to predict changes in precipitation at local or even regional scales. Finally, can you name any important agricultural crop that has seen a reduction in yield per unit area over the past century? You cannot, because years of agricultural research have improved both the plants and the farming practices. Our guess is that the research in the future will produce even greater increases in yields, despite any changes that occur to the climate.

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Like many of you, we have a Christmas tree here decorated with candy canes with a cute little coal train running around the base. The smell of pine is terrific and we are looking forward to eating the candy canes after the holidays. We are all planning a great holiday season and we are looking forward to a bright future. We hope you and your family share our optimism during this fun time of the year.

Today, we will turn out attention to the state of affairs for the tree and the candy canes, and we searched the literature for any updates on how pine trees and sugar cane will fare in a world of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Given that the literature contains literally thousands of articles on the positive effects of elevated CO2 on plants, we were optimistic that recent material could be found. Of course, three articles were located within minutes dealing with elevated CO2, pine trees, and sugarcane.

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Today’s (September 6th, 2006) Washington Post, features Ben Giliberti’s Wine of the Week—a Tamar Ridge 2005 Pinot Gris from Tasmania. After extolling the virtues of this rich white, peary, with a hint of almond and French oak, Giliberti proclaims it to be “one of the most exciting pinot gris I have tasted from anywhere lately” adding “global warming…appears to working in Tasmania’s favor.”

Let’s guess that there’s a post-it note stuck to the editor’s monitor when it comes to global warming: “No Fact Checks, Please.”

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