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From what I understand, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will have a massive greening effect on the Earth (plants love CO2). But it seems this fact is

From what I understand, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will have a massive greening effect on the Earth (plants love CO2). But it seems this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message. I always found it ironic that the "eco" mode button in many cars is a leaf icon.

abraae 8y ago
It's not a slam dunk that more CO2 == good for plants. As per https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511 https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie... > As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
- avar 8y ago
  The GP is talking about a "greening effect" on the Earth due to CO^2, but the article you've linked to and this quote is talking about how the nutritional content of plants for human consumption might suffer with more CO^2. Unless you think that the only thing that's "good for plants" is their suitability for being eaten by humans this seems like an unrelated issue. The vast majority of the Earth's plant biomass isn't going to be eaten by humans. You're not going to nibble on the oak tree in your back yard, but increased CO^2 in the air will make it more efficient at sequestering carbon. It's not going to be some amazing increase in perceived growth rate. The CO^2 level indoors is often 2-3x what it is outside, and people already grow plants in those conditions.
ordu 8y ago
Green mass of the leafs is the captured carbon dioxide that doesn't contribute to a greenhouse effect. Even if all leafs will be oxidized in a year, it doesn't matter because new leafs will emerge. Though I'm not sure about actual green mass on the Earth and cannot compare it with mass of CO2 in athmosphere, maybe it is too small to have any effect.
- bouvin 8y ago
  An our challenge going forward is the long term sequestration of carbon, this will not help, as it will not capture the excess CO₂ released by humanity. If a significant part of this greening is farmland, there is of course also the CO₂ released through field work and harvesting to consider.
taneq 8y ago
> it seems this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message Any time a group starts altering the facts like this, it just shows that they value their 'message' above the truth, and they lose all credibility. Edit: Downvote = disagree, or people genuinely believe it's OK to lie to further your cause, I'm not sure what's more disturbing.
- jshevek 8y ago
  Activists often think it's okay to lie to advance their cause.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    Well, obviously. Look at how many lies we take as fact in order to get through any modern discussion on politics and public policy.
- pjc50 8y ago
  The fact is often omitted because people use it to erase the problem. Is it worth submerging a large area of Bangladesh for a very slight global increase in plant growth? In particular there's a faction of people who use "CO2 is plant food" to argue that it cannot be harmful, that reduction efforts would be wrong, etc.
- mturmon 8y ago
  For me, the problem with your remark is that it's proposing some kind of alteration of message (lying, in essence) by "a group" which is not really identified, but might be "climate scientists" - but with no actual evidence. And also, the whole discussion branch nearby on the greening effect of small increases in CO2 is really missing the point, and is completely ungrounded in any science. There is a whole literature out there on how significant this effect is relative to other effects of rising CO2! (Spoiler: it is not that significant.)
  - taneq 8y ago
    > For me, the problem with your remark is that it's proposing some kind of alteration of message (lying, in essence) by "a group" which is not really identified, but might be "climate scientists" - but with no actual evidence. So you disagree with the grandparent post's statement that "But it seems this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message."? There are plenty of large, prominent climate activist groups making prominent public statements. I've never heard a single one of them discuss this aspect. (Contrast with scientific papers, many of which do mention it and which are not what we were talking about).
simonh 8y ago
Clearly increased plant growth due to higher CO2 concentrations are not stopping CO2 concentrations from spiking precipitously right now, because it's still spiking precipitously. It's very small effect that would take enormous spans of time to make any significant difference. Also in order for those plants to grow faster and make a difference, there needs to be a significant amount of plants. So it's a marginal issue. If plants grow at (made up number) 2% faster due to higher CO2 concentrations, that doesn't help much if we've wiped out 90% of the plant biomass.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  but TFA clearly says we haven't wiped out 90% of the plant biomass. It clearly says that there are more plants than there were 20 years ago, not less. CO2 concentrations are growing at <1% pa (year on year - there are large variations between northern hemisphere summer/winter), so an additional 2% absorbing effect from an increasing number of plants is not insignificant.
  - simonh 8y ago
    As I said I was making up numbers. Given enough plants they will eventually sequester all the CO2 (if we let them). This effect would make that slightly more efficient, that's all. However the actual amount of plant matter sequestering the CO2, and what those plants are and how efficiently they work to do so, are likely to be a much more significant factors. Whatever those factors are though, we're talking about extremely long periods of time.
imtringued 8y ago
The fundamental problem is that humans are not plants. In 100 million years all the CO2 might become coal or oil again but humans won't be there to witness it.
- fooker 8y ago
  No, not again. Coal came from plants in an era where microbes could not yet decompose plants.
  - yostrovs 8y ago
    Don't forget to credit fungi too!
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Peat is the first step in forming coal. Peat still forms under the correct conditions, so coal can still be formed. Conditions might be rarer, but the steps aren't solely reliant on the absence of microbes which now exist.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  No more coal. Right now the only way carbon is permanently lost from the ecosystem is from ocean crustacean shells being lost to the bottom of the ocean. Interestingly enough, before humans started freeing carbon, the ecosystem was in a period of all time low for available carbon.
ajuc 8y ago
> plants love CO2 In artifical conditions in laboratory there is a significant effect, up to 20% when doubling pre-industrial CO2 concentration. But, in practice for wild plants nitrogen quickly becomes the bottleneck, so the real gains are much smaller. And even for farming plants (which have fertilizer providing additional nitrogen) the real gains diminish, and are more in 5-10% range. For some crops CO2 has very little effect at all (for example corn). Additionally - crops grew with raised CO2 levels have less proteins and useful nutrients. And then you have to factor in the harmful effects from global warming on crops (heat damage, dry soil, less farmland available) and the overall effect is likely negative. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
- manmal 8y ago
  In the movie Interstellar, mildew was the straw that broke the camel‘s back for agriculture. From what I‘ve read, this can be a possibility if CO2 rises too high.
  - bewo001 8y ago
    And it was somehow easier to move people and farms to a giant space station than to build climate controlled greenhouses on earth. But it looked stunning in the movie..
    - tjpaudio 8y ago
      The space station was an arc traveling to the new planet they found.
    - manmal 8y ago
      People also got sick and died from dust particles, I guess the conjecture was that earth would soon become uninhabitable.
- ph0rque 8y ago
  Here's where a management that aims for diversity of plants comes in handy. If care is taken to plant the correct proportion of nitrogen-fixing plants, and other plants (such as comfrey) that will grow really deep roots to extract trace minerals, the nutrient density can be increased. There are techniques to increase the soil fertility with the correct selection of plants. There is a design science, permaculture, that takes all these factors into account.
sametmax 8y ago
Of course. I've seen people using the "when an ice melt in a glass, the glass doesn't overflow" argument. They can't see the ice on the land, the albedo effect, the salt concentration, the sea temperature, the gulf stream... If you make things complicated, the truth lose a lot of people to convenience. That's something the geeks have still a hard time to understand. They won't convince anybody by being right. That's not how public opinion work.
cowwithbeef 8y ago
>this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message. That sounds a lot like intentionally misleading people.
lukasm 8y ago
It's also extra Co2 for parasites.
mcv 8y ago
There's a good reason that the effect causing global warming is called the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2 a greenhouse gas. It comes from the use in greenhouses. The effect has been known for well over a century (which makes it all the more odd there's so much political resistance now to accept that this is happening). And while more plants is certainly a nice thing, there's more to having a healthy planet than just having more plants, especially when it comes at the cost of melting ice caps and changing weather patterns, possibly leading to desertification and less plants in other places. Although according to the article, this particular increase in greenery is mostly due to projects to plant more trees in Indian and China, and investments into agriculture. All of them good things that don't really need more CO2 in the atmosphere.

abraae 8y ago

It's not a slam dunk that more CO2 == good for plants. As per https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511 https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie... > As best scientists can tell, this is what happens: Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.

avar 8y ago
The GP is talking about a "greening effect" on the Earth due to CO^2, but the article you've linked to and this quote is talking about how the nutritional content of plants for human consumption might suffer with more CO^2. Unless you think that the only thing that's "good for plants" is their suitability for being eaten by humans this seems like an unrelated issue. The vast majority of the Earth's plant biomass isn't going to be eaten by humans. You're not going to nibble on the oak tree in your back yard, but increased CO^2 in the air will make it more efficient at sequestering carbon. It's not going to be some amazing increase in perceived growth rate. The CO^2 level indoors is often 2-3x what it is outside, and people already grow plants in those conditions.

ordu 8y ago

Green mass of the leafs is the captured carbon dioxide that doesn't contribute to a greenhouse effect. Even if all leafs will be oxidized in a year, it doesn't matter because new leafs will emerge. Though I'm not sure about actual green mass on the Earth and cannot compare it with mass of CO2 in athmosphere, maybe it is too small to have any effect.

bouvin 8y ago
An our challenge going forward is the long term sequestration of carbon, this will not help, as it will not capture the excess CO₂ released by humanity. If a significant part of this greening is farmland, there is of course also the CO₂ released through field work and harvesting to consider.

taneq 8y ago

> it seems this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message Any time a group starts altering the facts like this, it just shows that they value their 'message' above the truth, and they lose all credibility. Edit: Downvote = disagree, or people genuinely believe it's OK to lie to further your cause, I'm not sure what's more disturbing.

jshevek 8y ago
Activists often think it's okay to lie to advance their cause.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Well, obviously. Look at how many lies we take as fact in order to get through any modern discussion on politics and public policy.
pjc50 8y ago
The fact is often omitted because people use it to erase the problem. Is it worth submerging a large area of Bangladesh for a very slight global increase in plant growth? In particular there's a faction of people who use "CO2 is plant food" to argue that it cannot be harmful, that reduction efforts would be wrong, etc.
mturmon 8y ago
For me, the problem with your remark is that it's proposing some kind of alteration of message (lying, in essence) by "a group" which is not really identified, but might be "climate scientists" - but with no actual evidence. And also, the whole discussion branch nearby on the greening effect of small increases in CO2 is really missing the point, and is completely ungrounded in any science. There is a whole literature out there on how significant this effect is relative to other effects of rising CO2! (Spoiler: it is not that significant.)
- taneq 8y ago
  > For me, the problem with your remark is that it's proposing some kind of alteration of message (lying, in essence) by "a group" which is not really identified, but might be "climate scientists" - but with no actual evidence. So you disagree with the grandparent post's statement that "But it seems this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message."? There are plenty of large, prominent climate activist groups making prominent public statements. I've never heard a single one of them discuss this aspect. (Contrast with scientific papers, many of which do mention it and which are not what we were talking about).

simonh 8y ago

Clearly increased plant growth due to higher CO2 concentrations are not stopping CO2 concentrations from spiking precipitously right now, because it's still spiking precipitously. It's very small effect that would take enormous spans of time to make any significant difference. Also in order for those plants to grow faster and make a difference, there needs to be a significant amount of plants. So it's a marginal issue. If plants grow at (made up number) 2% faster due to higher CO2 concentrations, that doesn't help much if we've wiped out 90% of the plant biomass.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
but TFA clearly says we haven't wiped out 90% of the plant biomass. It clearly says that there are more plants than there were 20 years ago, not less. CO2 concentrations are growing at <1% pa (year on year - there are large variations between northern hemisphere summer/winter), so an additional 2% absorbing effect from an increasing number of plants is not insignificant.
- simonh 8y ago
  As I said I was making up numbers. Given enough plants they will eventually sequester all the CO2 (if we let them). This effect would make that slightly more efficient, that's all. However the actual amount of plant matter sequestering the CO2, and what those plants are and how efficiently they work to do so, are likely to be a much more significant factors. Whatever those factors are though, we're talking about extremely long periods of time.

imtringued 8y ago

The fundamental problem is that humans are not plants. In 100 million years all the CO2 might become coal or oil again but humans won't be there to witness it.

fooker 8y ago
No, not again. Coal came from plants in an era where microbes could not yet decompose plants.
- yostrovs 8y ago
  Don't forget to credit fungi too!
- swish_bob 8y ago
  Peat is the first step in forming coal. Peat still forms under the correct conditions, so coal can still be formed. Conditions might be rarer, but the steps aren't solely reliant on the absence of microbes which now exist.
merpnderp 8y ago
No more coal. Right now the only way carbon is permanently lost from the ecosystem is from ocean crustacean shells being lost to the bottom of the ocean. Interestingly enough, before humans started freeing carbon, the ecosystem was in a period of all time low for available carbon.

ajuc 8y ago

> plants love CO2 In artifical conditions in laboratory there is a significant effect, up to 20% when doubling pre-industrial CO2 concentration. But, in practice for wild plants nitrogen quickly becomes the bottleneck, so the real gains are much smaller. And even for farming plants (which have fertilizer providing additional nitrogen) the real gains diminish, and are more in 5-10% range. For some crops CO2 has very little effect at all (for example corn). Additionally - crops grew with raised CO2 levels have less proteins and useful nutrients. And then you have to factor in the harmful effects from global warming on crops (heat damage, dry soil, less farmland available) and the overall effect is likely negative. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...

manmal 8y ago
In the movie Interstellar, mildew was the straw that broke the camel‘s back for agriculture. From what I‘ve read, this can be a possibility if CO2 rises too high.
- bewo001 8y ago
  And it was somehow easier to move people and farms to a giant space station than to build climate controlled greenhouses on earth. But it looked stunning in the movie..
  - tjpaudio 8y ago
    The space station was an arc traveling to the new planet they found.
  - manmal 8y ago
    People also got sick and died from dust particles, I guess the conjecture was that earth would soon become uninhabitable.
ph0rque 8y ago
Here's where a management that aims for diversity of plants comes in handy. If care is taken to plant the correct proportion of nitrogen-fixing plants, and other plants (such as comfrey) that will grow really deep roots to extract trace minerals, the nutrient density can be increased. There are techniques to increase the soil fertility with the correct selection of plants. There is a design science, permaculture, that takes all these factors into account.

sametmax 8y ago

Of course. I've seen people using the "when an ice melt in a glass, the glass doesn't overflow" argument. They can't see the ice on the land, the albedo effect, the salt concentration, the sea temperature, the gulf stream... If you make things complicated, the truth lose a lot of people to convenience. That's something the geeks have still a hard time to understand. They won't convince anybody by being right. That's not how public opinion work.

cowwithbeef 8y ago

>this fact is usually omitted so as not to complicate the intended message. That sounds a lot like intentionally misleading people.

lukasm 8y ago

It's also extra Co2 for parasites.

mcv 8y ago

There's a good reason that the effect causing global warming is called the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2 a greenhouse gas. It comes from the use in greenhouses. The effect has been known for well over a century (which makes it all the more odd there's so much political resistance now to accept that this is happening). And while more plants is certainly a nice thing, there's more to having a healthy planet than just having more plants, especially when it comes at the cost of melting ice caps and changing weather patterns, possibly leading to desertification and less plants in other places. Although according to the article, this particular increase in greenery is mostly due to projects to plant more trees in Indian and China, and investments into agriculture. All of them good things that don't really need more CO2 in the atmosphere.