This is Ranga B. Myneni’s response to Lord Ridley’s 2016 Annual GWPF Lecture The Royal Society, London 17 October 2016 – which can be found here
Q: Did we suppress the greening results so they would not be included in the 2013 IPPC Report?
A: Our early results from 2012 were preliminary. Dr. Zhu was a Visiting Scholar from PRC at Boston University when we did this work. We were not satisfied with the attribution part of the work. We were happy to share what we had at several scientific meetings. It is these preliminary unpublished results that Lord Ridley is showcasing. Dr. Zhu returned to PRC in March 2013. His first job in PRC was with Chinese Academy of Sciences, which did not allow time to refine the preliminary results. A year later, he moved to Peking University as a Post-doctoral Fellow in Prof. Shilong Piao’s group. He was then able to work full-time on the attribution part and finally the paper was submitted in June 2015 and published in April 2016. It is not uncommon for such delays in research environments and the delay did help us to go to a journal with results on a better foundation. Inclusion/exclusion in IPCC reports was never a consideration in how we executed this work. The only consideration was to publish results that we felt were good enough to be published.
Q: Is Greening not a good thing?
A: We do not fully understand the CO2 fertilization effect. Experiments do indicate a fertilization effect and higher water use efficiency. The same experiments also indicate diminishing effects over time. Moreover, we do not know how much of what we observe in experiments translates in to the real world. Much of this has to do with how nutrient limitations would play out when CO2 becomes abundant. In short, there is no evidence to count on CO2 fertilization benefit. Personally, I would not buy the fertilization benefit for the price of global warming (and all the impacts that this warming implies).
Q: Are Climate Change (Global Warming) and attendant impacts real?
A: Lord Ridley discounts global warming and impacts. Yet, he is all for the fertilization benefit. He starts his talk with the statement “I am a passionate champion of Science” and goes on to ignore 30+ years of IPCC assessments! What is worse, he assumes that the people behind the science have malevolent motives (suppressing publication of our work … etc). How sensible is it to argue that thousands and thousands of scientists are somehow in cahoots to push the global warming hoax on innocent people of the world …
