Our previous story, Study suggests increased atmospheric CO2 creates a 30% growth in plant photosynthesis during last two centuries look almost entirely different than this press release from the CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE on the very same study.
Plants have been helping to offset climate change, but now it’s up to us
Findings affirm estimates used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models
Washington, DC — Plants are currently removing more CO2 from the air than they did 200 years ago, according to new work from Carnegie’s Joe Berry and led by J. Elliott Campbell of UC Merced. The team’s 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 photosynthesis — a series of cellular reactions through which they transform the Sun’s 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.
The magnitude of this effect is currently under debate. Could it be as large at the global scale as it is in small-scale greenhouse experiments? Or are other factors limiting the global system’s response to increased greenhouse gas emissions? A long-term record, similar to what we have for CO2 and temperature, is needed to address this large uncertainty in climate change projections.
“We’ve done something new here,” Campbell said. “Reliable measurements of photosynthesis are typically made at the leaf-level. But you can’t get the big picture that way, and we need to know what the Earth as a whole is doing and how it has responded through time.”
The team made use of previous work showing that the concentration of the atmospheric trace gas carbonyl sulfide can be used to infer the level of global photosynthesis. They constructed a history of its concentration using air trapped in Antarctic ice and snowpack for centuries, infrared spectra of the atmosphere taken by astronomers since the 1970s, and data from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration greenhouse gas sampling network, which began monitoring carbonyl sulfide in the late 1990s.
The results show that global photosynthesis was stable for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, but then grew rapidly throughout the 20th century. The recent increases in photosynthesis correlate with the increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel burning.
“The phenomenon of plants pulling carbon dioxide out of the air has been included in climate change models for many years,” Berry explained, “but it has always been difficult to know whether the strength of this effect is being modeled in a realistic way. Our new results affirm that the range of models used in the last IPCC assessment did, in fact, include realistic estimates of the sensitivity of global photosynthesis to CO2.”
“It may be tempting to interpret these results as evidence that Earth’s 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. Nature’s brakes are not up to the job. So now it’s up to us to figure out how to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.”
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I have been told here many times that climate scientists ignore that CO2 is a plant food, and even that they do not know this. Yet here we have an article all about that very thing, describing how it in the IPCC reports. Maybe they knew all along!
Wrong. They say nothing about it being plant food. It is a begrudging admittance that plants are using our nasty, evil, planet-killing CO2, but may not be able to slow its increase for much longer, and therefore, climageddon, unless we act now.
They used to ignore it.
I’ve been told many times by climate scientists that CO2 has no impact on plants because other limiting factors prevent plants from taking advantage of more CO2.
The fact that this appears to be changing is not evidence that they never held those positions previously.
seaice1: ” … climate scientists ignore that CO2 is a plant food”
A more apt description of Carbon Dioxide is ‘Life Food’, and climate scientists rarely (ever?) reference it that way.
Recall that all photosynthesis, whether plants or plankton requires CO2. There is no Life without CO2. That’s a compelling fact, especially when trying to rationalize the rationing of it. So, on the one side we have the compelling “CO2 is necessary for life” and on the other side we have a theory that has no laws, axioms, postulates, formulas or anything to reason with, i.e. no scientific value that is being used to promote the restriction of the Food of Life.
“plants in natural ecosystems have been expected to grow faster as the concentration of CO2”
That’s funny, up until very recently the “official” line was that other limiting factors would prevent plants from being able to benefit from the extra CO2 in the air.
I’m suspicious of the timescales here.
You would expect photosynthesis to have dropped steeply from about 1000 to 1600, which is the Med.Warm period to the Little Ice age, and then rise thereafter.
Are they claiming that a rise from about 1800 shows that industrialisation causes pollution? Or are they claiming that the period 1000 to 1600 was flat even though we know the temperatures varied widely?
Anti CO2 activists just hate life. They want make our lives miserable with their anti CO2 measures and plants’ lives miserable by starving them of CO2.
The idea that plants are offsetting CAGW presumes that CO2 is causing CAGW. There is no CAGW to offset and only a small, incremental GHG effect is partially offset by plants consuming more CO2 as concentrations rise. This should be expected as plants evolved when CO2 concentrations were much higher than today and are optimized for those higher concentrations.
So let’s see if I’m understanding this correctly:
Something called “global warming” is happening, but we’re only measured 0.8C of it in the last 130 years since coming out of the Little Ice Age; nobody knows if, or how much of it, is human-caused. Nobody knows what the best temperature is. All this is called “settled science” and there appears to be agreement that more CO2 is better for plants.
The inbred heir to the British throne, ignoring all the carnage caused by a thousand years of British brutality, has decided (decried?) the 4,500,000,000 year-old planet will end…momentarily.
And I’m supposed to be worried about this?
decried = decreed
decided, decreed, and decried
decrepit
“The recent increases in photosynthesis correlate with the increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel burning.”
Recently? What about before when it didn’t? What is the meaning of that, pray tell?
It may correlate with a the CO2 ambient level but it sure as heck doesn’t correlate well with temperature. The correlation with temperature is pretty good for CO2 in years before 2000, right? But not for AG CO2 at the same time, compared with now.
It sounds like two cases of spurious correlation, and vague correlations at that. All they can discuss is what P-value they can assign to the postulated cause and effect.
If the human GHG and global CO2 link was an aeroplane, would you fly in it, with so many bits missing and so little competence in the cockpit?
They covered every angle here but the carbon tax bill for each person and company but I’m sure their model has that too.
Did anyone ask the plankton?
Double dipping CAGW research! Not that the double dipped research is unusual; but most prior double dipped research claims were other groups leaping on a prior CAGW research claim that was not replicated nor validated.
Here we have the same researchers jumping on their own alleged research findings; again without verification, validation or replication.
In other words: No science is used here!
From yesterday’s research claims:
Contradictory findings.
Many possibilities.
Allegedly new ‘long term record’
New claim! Evidence = “fundamental shift in Earth’s pants”
No “new evidence” provided in the free abstract.
“Several processes”?
Meaning, that The model only had confirmation bias inputs included.
Again, a “new” model stuffed with too many assumptions and inputs without ever trying to ascertain a possible total array of conditions or restrictions.
Another ‘bad’ model! Bias garbage in; Confirmation bias out!
From the abstract:
Summing up the various sources, COS Carbonyl Sulfide is not a normal profile for stable chemistry.
Disassociates in water,
reactive to common metals,
Photo-reactive in light,
Reactive to O₂
Reactive to O₃
Forms carbonyl sulfide clathrate hydrates under low temperatures and pressure in the presence of pure water.
Carbonyl Sulfide is common in seawater, with saturation levels subject to daily, seasonal, and latitude variations.
Any chemical reactive with metals, atmospheric oxygen O₂, ozone O₃, pure water H₂O, under light, is not stable.
Yet NOAA refers to COS Carbonyl Sulfide as:
Lacking multigenerational double blind studies on global climate changed warming they did meta studies to find
“The magnitude of this effect is currently under debate. Could it be as large at the global scale as it is in small-scale greenhouse experiments? Or are other factors limiting the global system’s response to increased greenhouse gas emissions? A long-term record, similar to what we have for CO2 and temperature, is needed to address this large uncertainty in climate change projections.“
“Plants have been helping to offset climate change, but now it’s up to us”
Lazy, useless plants. Give up when things get tough. Well, we’ll manage without you plants. But don’t come crawling back asking for favours when it’s all sorted out.
Plants remove very little CO2 because little of it gets turned into fossil fuels. But most of the CO2 used to make the shells of shelled sea creatures ends up in the sediments and eventually becomes limestone. That’s how the environment lost 90% of its CO2 in the past 150M years.