Doom: Climate Change Causing Plants To Choke On Too Much Carbon

by William Teach | June 15, 2015 8:24 am

The latest (and very convenient) pronouncement from the Cult of Climastrology

Climate Change: Plants Choke on too Much Carbon[1]

It looks like even for plants, there can be too much of a good thing. Tree and flowers use carbon dioxide (C02) to make energy, absorbing the gas to help fuel the process of photosynthesis. For this reason, some experts have theorized that rising carbon levels will eventually promote plant growth. Now new research claims that this assumption is dead wrong.

That’s at least according to a study recently published in the journal Global Change Biology[2], which details how the plants in a number of very different ecosystems appear to actually suffer from too much carbon in the atmosphere.

Sample crops, grasslands, and forests all seemed to lose some ability to absorb nutrients when exposed to rising CO2 levels in large-scale field experiment held in eight countries across four continents.

“The findings of the study are unequivocal. The nitrogen content in the crops is reduced in atmospheres with raised carbon dioxide levels in all three ecosystem types,” Johan Uddling, a researcher with the University of Gothenburg, said in a statement.[3]

How very convenient. I wonder how plant life deal with CO2 during the previous 450 million years, when the CO2 level was much higher than today?

The study found that both wheat and rice are already suffering from heightening carbon levels – a phenomenon (both man and nature-driven) that has been frequently described[4] as impossible to stop[5].

The decline of wheat[6] in particular has already been associated with a climbing global temperature[7], which can be blamed[8] on climbing greenhouse gas levels.

There’s a little bit of a problem: wheat crops have been at record levels[9] year after year after year. There is no decline in wheat, except in the fevered minds of Warmists. Soy[10] also saw a record 2014, with rice and corn stayed flat (meaning that CO2 was not harming their production)

“We are seeing reduced nitrogen content even when growth has not been affected,” he explained. “Moreover, the effect is there in trials with powerful fertilizer, which indicates that it is not down to limited access to nitrogen in the soil. Future studies should look at what is causing the effect, but it appears to be linked to plants’ capacity to absorb nitrogen rather than to changed levels in the soil.”

So, wait, the explanation of doom from too much CO2 is too simple? It could be something else? There could be other factors in play?

The takeaway? Plants are more complicated than even scientists like to believe, and how climate change and its factors will impact them is still very much a mystery asking to be solved.

But, in order to deal with this mystery, we need to pass how pieces of legislation, international agreements, rules, and regulations, limiting personal freedom, giving Government more and more control of our lives, control of private entities, and control of economies.