Plants have been helping to offset climate change, but now it's up to us
Last edited Thu Apr 6, 2017, 09:48 PM - Edit history (1)
https://carnegiescience.edu/node/2170[font face=Serif][font size=5]Plants have been helping to offset climate change, but now its up to us[/font]
Wednesday, April 05, 2017
[font size=3]Washington, DCPlants are currently removing more CO2 from the air than they did 200 years ago, according to new work from Carnegies Joe Berry and led by J. Elliott Campbell of UC Merced. The teams findings, which are published in
Nature, affirm estimates used in models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Plants take up carbon dioxide as part of the process of photosynthesisa series of cellular reactions through which they transform the Suns energy into chemical energy for food. This research from Campbell, Berry, and their colleagues constructs a new history of global changes in photosynthetic activity.
Just as plants in actual glass greenhouses grow faster and more profusely when provided with elevated levels of CO2, plants in natural ecosystems have been expected to grow faster as the concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere increases. At the global scale, this effect could offer some stability to the climate system by countering increased human emissions of CO2.
It may be tempting to interpret these results as evidence that Earths dynamics are responding in a way that will naturally stabilize CO2 concentrations and climate, Berry added. But the real message is that the increase in photosynthesis has not been large enough to compensate for the burning of fossil fuels. Natures brakes are not up to the job. So now its up to us to figure out how to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature22030