51–60 of 65 posts
Sounds like it's a bit more nuanced than the headline would suggest. More CO₂ only means more growth when CO₂ is the limiting factor on growth in the first place. Water, nutrients, and sunlight all play a role as well.
Study means little as it takes a specific forest in Canada. We should probably look at Amazonian forests, California's redwoods, India's Vindhyas and Namibia's rainforests too.
Even the one neat CO2 trick I remember was really a hack to preserve water: some desert plants have a mechanism to store a day’s worth of CO2, allowing them to close pores and prevent evaporation.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a counterexample, I’d switch environments altogether and try again in bacteria, algae, and maybe grasses. While I doubt there would be much of a difference to trees, the first two are at least a few degrees further away from them in the deity’s org chart. All three categories also strike me as possibly being more relevant than trees in terms of total biomass, although that’s just a hunch that may be completely wrong.
Do plants in cities grow faster than plants in rural areas?
I once ran the numbers for O2, which is proportional, and it came out to roughly 10m of high in the atthmosphere. I. e. climb a tree in the countryside and you’re at O2 pressure similar to a city.
Study means little as it takes a specific forest in Canada. We should probably look at Amazonian forests, California's redwoods, India's Vindhyas and Namibia's rainforests too.
The basics of photosynthesis are more or less identical across green plants. All the cool evolutionary shit has been going on in preserving water and capturing light, pointing at CO2 probably not being a limiting factor. Even the one neat CO2 trick I remember was really a hack to preserve water: some desert plants have a mechanism to store a day’s worth of CO2, allowing them to close pores and prevent evaporation. An…
What is the right amount of CO2 to have in the atmosphere scientifically speaking?
If it's "as close to the nature right before apes became humans", it's easy to answer (though hard to justify on any grounds other than quasi-religous belief in Gaia or something). If it's "planet with more plants and animals" it could be quite different, and any honest scientist would answer it "we don't really know, but here are some considerations..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. It's a false claim from climate skeptics based on this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04616-8 The study is about sub saharan Africa, mostly the African savanna, and the identified drivers are human causes (decline in burned area, changes in herbivores density). They explicitly exclude CO2 levels increase as a driver.
>Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
> CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
I acknowledge that CO2 contributes to fertilisation. I was refuting the claim about the saharan desert. Your new link doesn't seem to contradict me : > CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics