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Maybe slightly but it's very rare that the limiting factor on plant growth is the availability of CO2. Much more commonly plants are limited by access to nutri
by mikeyouse 5y ago
Maybe slightly but it's very rare that the limiting factor on plant growth is the availability of CO2. Much more commonly plants are limited by access to nutrients and sunlight.
I worked for an algae biotech company and while we did "dope" our ponds with CO2, providing ample mixing to get more sunlight and supplementing the ponds with plentiful nutrients (the "big 3" but also trace elements of a number of more obscure inputs) had dramatically larger impacts on growth rates.
AFAIK, the FACE studies do show faster growth with more CO2, but it's only observable at concentrations ~200ppm over ambient. [https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2004.01224.x https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137....]
- aliasEli 5y ago> Much more commonly plants are limited by access to nutrients and sunlight. In many parts of the world water is also pretty important. We know that global warming will change global air currents, but is pretty difficult to predict how this will affect precipitation.
- mikeyouse 5y agoYep - very good point - you can easily see my bias here since our "plants" were suspended in water (an algae farm) so it was never a concern for us - but if you look at the basic photosynthetic formula you need as many molecules of water as you do of CO2.