Stephen Schneider transcript, regarding CO2's effect on corn: "it's probably good in the sense that it's going to be increasing your crop yields"

SBS Insight - Stephen Schneider - Transcript

Please read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and there's an entire chapter of what we call paleo-climate and it in fact takes a look over that record and if you take a look at the reconstruction of the last 1,000 years, and it's controversial how to do it, because a tree ring is not measuring ‑ it's not a thermometer but it's proportional to temperature.

.... New York is the ultimate example where in the winter time it can be 5 degrees cooler in the suburbs - large amounts than it is in the city.

However, what the climate scientists have done over the years, I don't do this kind of work but I have many colleagues, is they go and they take all the thermometers, it is certainly not 80% of thermometers near cities, the vast bulk of them are distributed and are not, you know, affected by urban heat islands, and they pull them out of the record and it takes this record which is about eight tenths of a degree warming and it drops it down less than a tenth of a degree.
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So if you use that as a correction and you take the population of these cities and you subtract warming according to that you get almost again the same answer. So that very good question that you asked is exactly the same question that climate scientists have been asking themselves for 30 to 40 years and their answer is it makes very, very little difference and it's corrected for and you have to correct for it or you wouldn't be doing it right.
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PROFESSOR STEPHEN SCHNEIDER:         If you're a green plant and you live by yourself CO2 will make you grow faster, there's no doubt of that. However, if you're a green plant that's not very, very helped by CO2, only a little bit, and there's a bigger one that's helped a lot, it's going to get a very bigger leaf, shade you out and you're worse off. So what CO2 does is it changes the competitive balance of plants in an ecosystem therefore it's hard to use a word like good or bad. If you have a corn field I'd argue it's probably good in the sense that it's going to be increasing your crop yields because the corn field's an artificial ecosystem that you've turned into a monoculture. In a natural system it's not very good because it's changing things in a way that we don't know how to do it.
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So what we tried to do with our guidance language is to be consistent in what the word meant. So if you use the word high confidence it means greater than 9 out of 10 - very high confidence greater than 9.5 out of 10. So is it true what we estimate? Not necessarily because a lot of uncertainties you simply don't have the data and you don't therefore have that higher confidence. But at least we're consistent in the language. So when you mentioned that the probabilities assigned from say the 2000 IPCC report up to the 2007 for the probability of human‑induced change, it did go up from something like 80 to 90 and that's not because of the models themselves, it's because we had extra accumulated data which gave you a chance to calibrate the model's prediction relative to that data and when it agreed fairly well that statistically allows you to increase your confidence.
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I would argue, some of you may smile, that one of the most credible sets of information is to read the IPCC reports.  They drip with caveats.
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PROFESSOR STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Well of course that's a personal judgment about what, I'm afraid that we have a very uncomfortable probability which to me is more than 10% of some pretty nasty outcomes. We also have, you know, 10, 20% chance that there won't be very many nasty outcomes and everything else sort of in between. I'm more worried about what the US Pentagon officials said which is that climate change is not the cause of security threats but it's a threat multiplier because you don't want to sit there in already stressed areas and then add stress. I worry more about that than I do about most other aspects of climate.

You know, if we raise the sea level many metres, yeah, we're going to move, we're going to move billions of people and trillions of dollars but that's replaceable.