This week we start a new series in which we go through last summer’s DOE Climate Report chapter by chapter. Of course we have encouraged you to read it yourself and many of you did. But with all the sound and fury of the critics, and in case you have a life, you might have missed some of the important information in there. Since we don’t have lives, and wouldn’t know what to do with them if we did, we hereby present it, starting with the first two chapters that explain something CDN readers already know: CO2 is not a pollutant, it’s plant food, and it’s leading to global greening.

Chapter 1 makes a simple point that what governments have taken to calling “carbon pollution” isn’t actually a pollutant. Pollutants disrupt biological processes and hurt or kill plants and animals. Thus the US Clean Air Act defines six types of pollution and CO2 isn’t on the list. Unlike the ones that are (such as particulates, sulfur dioxide, lead, carbon monoxide and others) CO2 is harmless even at levels far higher than we currently experience or will under any foreseeable emissions scenario.

In fact, far from being a hazard CO2 is beneficial for plants. Chapter 2.1 of the report talks about global greening, something we’ve been all over ourselves. It explains that CO2 is an essential input for plant photosynthesis and the increasing amount of the stuff in the atmosphere has led directly to a huge boost in plant growth. Not only does it boost plant growth directly, it also makes plants more efficient in how they use water because they need fewer and smaller “stomata”, holes in the leaves that let CO2 in as a feature and water out as a bug, so they become more resilient to drought. And they point out something that we and others have long noticed: the IPCC goes to great lengths not to discuss this. They never mention it in their Summaries for Policymakers and only ever make brief mentions deep in the technical chapters. The DOE team moved it right up front in their report where it belongs.

Section 2.2 discusses the ocean acidification issue, although they rightly point out the oceans aren’t acidic they’re basic and the effect of increased CO2 is only to make them a bit less alkaline, not actually acidic. They explain, for the benefit of readers who only ever hear about corals from the mainstream media, that in recent years despite all the gloom the Great Barrier Reef has been booming and has more coral coverage than any time since records began in the 1980s.And they present some interesting observations from researchers complaining about the fact that the literature on the effects of ocean “acidification” on fish and other marine life is heavily biased towards scary results, even though many past such studies were subsequently debunked. Unfortunately the pattern we’ve come to expect in climate research extends right into the oceans.

Next week: Chapter 3, human influences on the climate.