From NJ.com:
I hope that guy never gets to hear Dyson’s most heretical assertion: Atmospheric CO-2 may actually be improving the environment.
“It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation,” Dyson said. “About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil.”
In fact, there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO-2 than the negative effects, he said. So why does the public hear only one side of this debate? Because the media do an awful job of reporting it.
Not my quote- 15 % of 7 Billion is food for 1 Billion people.
Lars P. a commentator on WUWT pointed that out.
If I can quibble while agreeing with Dave Burton, Natural Selection is a slow process. The improvements he addresses in Food Crops will actually be due to Artificial Selection.
The 15% estimate comes from Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) studies. It’s the obvious conclusion that you reach from eyeballing the graphs, and extrapolating back to 290 ppm. But there’s good reason to think that this 15% estimate is a lower bound, for two reasons:
1. Bunce (2012) finds that the Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) methodology results in an underestimate of the agricultural productivity improvement from higher CO2 level, as also explained by Prof. George Hendrey.
2. The intuitive reason that, as decades pass, natural selection will cause plant phenotypes to adjust to environmental changes, enabling them to better utilize higher CO2 levels, compared to what shorter-duration studies measure.
The alarmist are not interested in CO2. They are only interested in control.
If you look at plant growth rates in response to CO2 enrichment & depletion, this conclusion is inescapable. But the climate movement activists steadfastly refuse to accept the obvious. E.g., I said this on a climate alarmist blog in January, and look at the nasty responses I got:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/23/1980-cronkite-on-climate/comment-page-1/#comment-17640