Climate scientists recently discovered that they’ve been underestimating the impact of a particular organic compound in the atmosphere, and the oversight’s significance is so profound that it’s left existing climate models completely obsolete. As Jo Nova writes, “This is so big, it may change the sacred ‘climate sensitivity’ of the whole Earth”.
Isoprene is what’s known as a volatile organic compound, or a VOC, and “has a recognized role in protecting plants against many abiotic stresses” like “heat stress…drought…[and] oxidative stress” with trees being the greatest emitters. (When the chemical isoprene interacts with other compounds in the atmosphere, the products are a number of secondary organic aerosols.)
Here’s some additional context, from Jo Nova:
To put some perspective on this, isoprene is the most abundant non-methane hydrocarbon emitted into the atmosphere.
And, from a study published in the Annals of Botany and sourced from the NIH:
In the tropics, plant leaves can grow very large, and this creates a large boundary layer insulating the leaf from air temperature, allowing the leaf temperature to exceed air temperature by 10 °C and more. Also, in humid air, heat loss by latent heat of evaporation is reduced. The humid tropics are known to have many isoprene-emitting species….
(Think the Amazon.)
Now, back to the original point, and Nova’s item:
But climate models have … been estimating aerosols in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and they [scientists] didn’t realize trees made so much aerosol than they thought.
Nova also includes this blurb, from CERN researcher and study spokesman Jasper Kirkby:
‘This new source of biogenic particles in the upper troposphere may impact estimates of Earth’s climate sensitivity, since it implies that more aerosol particles were produced in the pristine pre-industrial atmosphere than previously thought,’ adds Kirkby. ‘However, until our findings have been evaluated in global climate models, it’s not possible to quantify the effect.’
So there’s a substance that’s shockingly abundant and has a far greater effect on the climate and weather patterns than previously thought, and it hasn’t been considered in the current “global climate models” — but it’s hard to “quantify” how consequential this error is? According to CERN, climate models and predictions just need to be “refined” in light of the new information.
Try thrown out and redone from scratch.
Maybe the impact of isoprene can’t be exactly quantified, but we can roughly evaluate the effects, and acknowledge that their “climate change” narratives (and accompanying agendas) began on a false premise.
We call that a fallacy—which coincidentally, underpins all progressive weather theories.
This all begs the question: What else are they missing?
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Amazon forests really are cloud machines (and the climate models had no idea)
