Houweling Nurseries Ltd. (dba, Houweling Tomatoes) operates a 20-hectare greenhouse facility in Delta, B.C., producing both fresh tomatoes and propagated vegetable seedlings for other greenhouse vegetable growers. The heat and CO2 requirements are supplied by five natural gas fired boilers which have an estimated efficiency of approximately 84%. The estimated emissions produced by the current operation of the natural gas fired boilers is 23.7 tonnes annually.
The boilers operate throughout the day to produce heat which is stored in a 1.5 million gallon reserve tank and subsequently used as required in the greenhouse. Some amounts of the CO2-enriched exhaust is used to promote a healthy crop and vegetable production. An additional 1,000 tonnes of liquid CO2 is purchased for our seedling propagation department, as the CO2 generated from the current system is not acceptable for growing seedlings. ...
This led Houweling's to install a system which produces 21,400 tons of CO2 annually (the equivalent of more than 4,000 cars), in order to save energy, and increase their crop production —
http://www.houwelings.com/files-2/energy-project.php
Here's a video describing Houweling's greenhouse operation in Camarillo, California, which uses the same GE cogeneration system —
Here are quotes regarding Houweling's growing operation from an article at seeker.com, entitled 'Capturing CO2 With Tomates'. The owner of 'Houweling's Tomatoes', Casey Houweling, states that adding CO2 is required to keep the plants growing — and notice how dramatic the per acre yield is when compared with traditional farming — the video linked to on the Houweling website states an increased production of up to 40% from the CO2 generation —
https://www.seeker.com/capturing-co2-with-tomatoes-1765929007.html
http://archive.is/LdEhc
...
"In a greenhouse, if we don't add C02," Houweling said, "the plants will pull down the level so much they will stop growing."
Houweling says the addition of the co-generation plant makes his greenhouse facility almost 100 percent energy-efficient. He recycles 90 percent of his waste, captures rainwater for irrigation, and has deployed five acres of solar panels. The greenhouse-grown tomatoes also use less land than traditional row farming. That is a further energy savings, according to Scott Nolen, product line leader for General Electric.
"He can grow as much food on 150 acres as his neighbor in 5,500 acres," Nolen said.
...
But it isn't difficult to find websites and blogs with postings like these, which use only conjecture to dismiss the benefits of increased levels of CO2 —
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food.htm
http://archive.is/EWZhO
http://www.skepticalscience.com/carbon-fertilization-effect.html
http://archive.is/WXSZ5
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/11/co_2-fertilization/
http://archive.is/EksBe
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/06/04/the-co2-fertilization-effect-wont-deter-climate-change/
http://archive.is/oUklu
For example, consider this quote from skepticalscience.com —
https://archive.is/XPyIS
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food.htm
...
It is possible to boost growth of some plants with extra CO2, under controlled conditions inside of greenhouses. Based on this, 'skeptics' make their claims of benefical botanical effects in the world at large. Such claims fail to take into account that increasing the availability of one substance that plants need requires other supply changes for benefits to accrue. It also fails to take into account that a warmer earth will see an increase in deserts and other arid lands, reducing the area available for crops.
...
That almost sounds reasonable, but it is just a wild guess, and it is contradicted by real experiments in open environments. Namely, the often cited Duke free-air CO2 enrichment site, which shows that increasing CO2 alone increases plant growth, despite plant dependence on other elements like nitrogen.
Notice this quote from a research paper regarding tree growth in the Duke free-air CO2 enrichment site —
https://jacksonlab.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/np10.pdf http://archive.is/xajj0
https://earth.stanford.edu/jacksonlab/publications
http://archive.is/SBedu
...
• Generally, elevated [CO2] caused sustained increases in plant biomass production and in standing C [carbon], but did not affect the partitioning of C among plant biomass pools. Spatial variation in net primary productivity and its [CO2]-induced enhancement was controlled primarily by N [nitrogen] availability, with the difference between precipitation and potential evapotranspiration explaining most interannual variability. Consequently, [CO2]-induced net primary productivity enhancement ranged from 22 to 30% in different plots and years.
...
The point here is not that global warming is false, but the ridiculous way that zealots who advocate action to stop it defend their view.
The quote from skepticalscience.com above is the obvious expression of a preconceived agenda, in that it attempts to dismiss real world experience with sweeping generalizations which guess about the possible conditions everywhere in the earth's environment. And the comment regarding an 'increase in deserts and other arid lands, reducing the area available for crops', immediately brings to mind the crops grown in California's central valley, which require external water supplies to be produced — not to mention the massive amount of the earth's land mass that is currently too cold to farm.
Those whose hold truth above any other consideration do not talk or write in the manner of the article quoted above at skepticalscience.com — that is, they acknowledge it when their opinions cannot be demonstrated.
Many people reading this will quickly dismiss it as another example of so-called 'climate change denial' — which is in itself a comical politically correct denigration, in that no one has ever denied climate change. But even if some have, the charge of 'climate change denial' is simply an ad hominem fallacy that does nothing to demonstrate that anything being proposed by global warming zealots will actually change the earth's climate in a way that is beneficial to humans.
This truly is a comical aspect of the hysteria in certain circles over global warming. Whether or not the earth's climate is in a long term warming trend is not the relevant question — the relevant question is: 'Can humans control the long term temperature trend of the entire planet, and can they improve the conditions of human soceities by doing so?'
Even if you can prove that global warming is occurring, and that humans are contributing to it, it still does nothing to address the question posed above. The earth (as well as every other planet) is part of a large complex system, and most of what happens to it is on a scale that is far beyond the control of human societies. This is the ultimate folly of the cries to action over global warming — even if you can prove a long term temperature trend is in place, it is impossible to prove that any action to alter that trend will do anything positive for any individual's life — which is the only thing that matters.
This reminds me of an old Soviet joke I read about in an article on reason.com —
A schoolboy asks his father if Marxism-Leninism is a science, and his father answers:This is in essence what global warming zealots are arguing for — that all human societies should be theirs to experiment with.
“I reckon not, son. When scientists do experiments, it’s always on animals, not humans.”
If it seems too demanding to require actual proof of a benefit from the prescriptions of global warming zealots, I'd ask: 'Why would anyone ever expect less?' That is, how is it that the entire population of the earth should be subject to the guesses and assumptions of some minority of people, when that minority cannot demonstrate that anything they are demanding will create a long term benefit? Why should any group of people put that kind of extraordinary faith in others? There's no reasonable way to defend such a view, even if global warming is true.
Everyone knows that the earth's temperature changes over time, and that the earth's climate may be in a long term warming trend — but how many are willing to reorder human societies using government force, based on the conjecture of a group of morally presumptuous individuals, who want their guesses to trump actual experience?
It is not the criticisms of the claims of global warming zealots that should make one suspicious of those claims — it is the intellectually dishonest way that many global warming zealots defend their claims.
Global warming zealots give the impression that they actually enjoy the so-called 'deniers', because it is the 'deniers' that feed the zealot's pretentious facade of moral superiority. And even worse, global warming zealots give the impression that they enjoy having some issue they can use to argue that they should be able to control people's lives.
But the zealots rarely give the impression that they are actually concerned about the wellbeing of human societies.
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