Poison Ivy

There's a news story going around that poison ivy is becoming more hazardous due to global warming. I saw similar stories on NBC and ABC. Here' s ABC's story on it. This is an example of the sort of global warming spin being put on nearly everything.

The story itself is that two studies have been published in the last year on the effects of carbon dioxide on poison ivy. They showed that the plant grows faster in the presence of elevated CO2 and that the amount of oil the plant produces is higher but not significantly so.

Here is how the story is being spun.

The study examined how the increase of carbon dioxide in the past 50 years, brought on by climate change, has affected the growth of poison ivy.

This confuses global warming and climate change. The writer thinks that global warming caused the increase in CO2 instead of CO2 causing global warming. (1)

Although the amount of the rash-causing oil produced by the plant didn't increase significantly, the amount of the oil produced per plant did increase, according to the study.

NBC hasn't posted a version of their story so you will have to take my word on this part - the NBC story began by telling about a young teenager who didn't used to react to poison ivy but does now. We were left to conclude that poison ivy is now stronger than it had been. The teaser for the story implied the same thing. Notice that the quote above says that the oil did not increase significantly. we are not growing super-ivy that can infect the previously immune.

All of this is obvious and superficial. The real spin is focusing on poison ivy. There have been numerous studies showing that all plants grow faster with increased CO2. This means more food with less fertilizer. This is a very strong up-side to the increased levels of CO2 but it is usually ignored. After all, we can't let people think that something good might come from carbon dioxide.

There have literally been hundreds of these studies done since the early 1980s. The results have been so consistent that I'm surprised that anyone is still doing them.

But two studies showed that an undesirable weed is also affected by CO2. None of the other studies made the national news, just the ones that make increased plant growth seem like a bad thing.

(1) There actually is some evidence that warming is causing some of the increase in CO2. In Al Gore's movie, he shows slides of temperature increases and CO2 increases. These are on separate slides because the CO2 increases follow the temperature increases. I suspect that the reporter who wrote the article was not aware of this and simply got his cause and effect reversed.