How do climate change models currently account for increase in plants? Are these plant growth numbers in line with expectations? Is this a large change or a rounding error in those models?
Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
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Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#12Did anybody else expect this? Plants love CO2, seems like excess will lead to crazy plant growth and a rebalance.
So far it's the first confirmed case of negative feedback from global warming that I've seen, and that makes me hopeful.
Another one is smoke from forest fires; actively cooling the planet.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#13Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#14Did anybody else expect this? Plants love CO2, seems like excess will lead to crazy plant growth and a rebalance.
The problem is that humans love to destroy plants.
Crazy plant growth does not matter if we have unprecedented megafires each year and in several continents at the same time.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#15I assume plant life is constrained by different things in different locations:
- lack of water
- too hot
- too cold
- not enough light (ground level of the rain forest?)
- lack of soil nutrients (rain forest?)
- too much salt
I'll add CO2 levels to my mental list, a constraint that's independent of location.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#16Did anybody else expect this? Plants love CO2, seems like excess will lead to crazy plant growth and a rebalance.
Plants also love humidity. It seems likely that global warming leads to more water vapor in the air.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#17Did anybody else expect this? Plants love CO2, seems like excess will lead to crazy plant growth and a rebalance.
So far it's the first confirmed case of negative feedback from global warming that I've seen, and that makes me hopeful.
There are several others. I'm not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that the most significant potential negative feedback loop by far is the potential for increased cloud cover from increased humidity. It's evidently the most difficult aspect of global warming to model, although climate scientists are making continuous progress. In addition, the marginal radiative forcing of CO2 decreases with its concentration, which means both that increases in emissions do less harm as things get worse, and that reductions in emissions do less good.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#18We’ve known about this effect for awhile. Tree growth has increased on volume but decreased in density since the industrial revolution[0]. A small bump in plant growth can not be seen as anything but the smallest of a silver lining.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037811271...
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another one is smoke from forest fires; actively cooling the planet.
Have you come across any quantification of this?
Great question. We know that a large enough volcano eruption can cause a year long winter so I'm curious how much large scale forest fires can compare. Also, assuming regrowth is allowed, the CO2 impact from the burned wood is neutral in the long run.
Re: Study: Global plant growth surging alongside carbon dioxide (2017)
#20Not a scientist or otherwise expert, but this seems like a silver lining in the climate change that will eventually lead to humans not being able to inhabit the planet and the impact people are having on the planet: plants get more food and grow more. Am I wrong in that thought?
Plants get more carbon, but not more minerals or elements that are only in the soil. And that may mean more volume, maybe more calories, but less food. That, even if we assume that we get to an stable and livable weather plateau, and not an ever increasing global warming, extreme weather, and livable conditions for every animal and plant. And even in that plateau, if the ecosystem that make that plants to live (I don…
Over the very long term, I see no reason to think that higher CO2 levels are fundamentally worse for life than pre-industrial levels. In general, plants are the foundation of the food chain, and higher CO2 levels are better for them. In addition, life depends on liquid water, and given that surface temperatures are generally closer to the freezing point of water than the boiling point, I could see how higher temperatures might increase the amount of land and ocean surface hospitable to life. The problem is the transition period, during which most things go extinct until evolution can slowly regenerate the lost diversity over 10+ million years.