“Our research makes it clear that decisions we are making every day–how we heat our homes, what we eat, how we move around, what we choose to purchase–are making our food less nutritious and imperiling the health of other populations and future generations,” said Sam Myers, lead author of the study and principal research scientist at Harvard Chan School.
The study will be published online August 27, 2018 in Nature Climate Change.
Presently, more than 2 billion people worldwide are estimated to be deficient in one or more nutrients. In general, humans tend to get a majority of key nutrients from plants: 63% of dietary protein comes from vegetal sources, as well as 81% of iron and 68% of zinc. It has been shown that higher atmospheric levels of CO2result in less nutritious crop yields, with concentrations of protein, iron, and zinc being 3%-17% lower when crops are grown in environments where CO2concentrations are 550 parts per million (ppm) compared with crops grown under current atmospheric conditions, in which CO2 levels are just above 400 ppm.
For this new study, researchers sought to develop the most robust and accurate analysis of the global health burden of CO2-related nutrient shifts in crops in 151 countries. To do so, they created a unified set of assumptions across all nutrients and used more detailed age- and sex-specific food supply datasets to improve estimates of the impacts across 225 different foods. The study built on previous analyses by the researchers on CO2-related nutritional deficiencies, which looked at fewer foods and fewer countries.
The study showed that by the middle of this century, when atmospheric CO2 concentrations are expected to reach around 550 ppm, 1.9% of the global population–or roughly 175 million people, based on 2050 population estimates–could become deficient in zinc and that 1.3% of the global population, or 122 million people, could become protein deficient. Additionally, 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 who are currently at high risk of iron deficiency could have their dietary iron intakes reduced by 4% or more.
The researchers also emphasized that billions of people currently living with nutritional deficiencies would likely see their conditions worsen as a result of less nutritious crops.
According to the study, India would bear the greatest burden, with an estimated 50 million people becoming zinc deficient, 38 million becoming protein deficient, and 502 million women and children becoming vulnerable to diseases associated with iron deficiency. Other countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East would also be significantly impacted.
“One thing this research illustrates is a core principle of the emerging field of planetary health,” said Myers, who directs the Planetary Health Alliance, co-housed at Harvard Chan School and Harvard University Center for the Environment. “We cannot disrupt most of the biophysical conditions to which we have adapted over millions of years without unanticipated impacts on our own health and wellbeing.”
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Meanwhile, there’s still lots of squawking over nutritionally enhanced golden rice.
A similar concern was expressed during the 1970s over the impact of fertilizers. The concerns apparently were not credible. Note that the article says “lower concentrations.” The implication is that the grain or fruit will grow larger, but with similar amounts of nutrients for the entire kernel, thus lowering the amount of nutrients per unit weight. Most people are unaware that a lot of fruits and vegetables are being grown in greenhouses today with enhanced CO2 levels. No one has expressed a concern about those expensive ‘organic’ fruits and vegetables.
Another predictable drumbeat in the ecofascists’ war on photosynthesis.
https://imgur.com/a/QZskjcK
The climate activists are desperate to find a dark lining in the silver cloud of soaring crop yields and increasingly rare famines. A mathematician named Irakli Loladze is one of the most prominent promoters of the claim that CO2 fertilization makes crops less nutritious. I had a “Quora debate” with him about it, starting last September:
https://sealevel.info/Is_Irakli_Loladze_right_that_rising_CO2_levels_are_affecting_the_nutritional_value_of_plants.html
The tl;dr version is that, just as with studies predicting crop failures from rising temperatures, the projected ill effects of CO2 fertilization require assuming that farmers are stupid, and won’t not follow agricultural best practices.
W/r/t temperature, the climate propagandists assume farmers are too stupid to adjust planting dates and cultivar selections according to local temperatures. W/r/t the effects of CO2 fertilization on nutrition, they assume farmers are too stupid to realize that more productive crops may require adjusted fertilization practices, if nutrients are in short supply in the local soil.
Excerpts (edited):
Most studies have not found evidence that the overall nutritional value of crops is reduced by the improved plant productivity from CO2 fertilization. Rather, they’ve found that when crops are grown in iron-poor or zinc-poor soil, the larger yields may contain lower levels (though not lower overall quantities!) of those micro-nutrients. There’s no net protein or micronutrient reduction due to CO2 fertilization, because the increase in growth rates is greater than the protein or micronutrient level reductions.
As it happens, dietary shortages of those micro-nutrients are easily resolved through either fertilization or very inexpensive nutritional supplementation. In the case of iron, it can be as simple as cooking in cast-iron pots.
It is possible to contrive growing conditions in which something other than CO2 limits plant growth and health, or in which a shortage of some soil nutrient causes better crop yields to be accompanied by reduced levels of some nutrient, but such contrived conditions are easily avoided through normal agricultural fertilization practices. Under real-world conditions, additional CO2 is dramatically beneficial for agriculture, to levels far beyond what we can ever hope to reach in the outdoor atmosphere, and the nutrient value of crops grown with extra CO2 is not significantly different from other crops.
If you want proof of that fact, read up on the relative nutritional values of crops grown in greenhouses vs crops grown outdoors.
Most commercial greenhouses use CO2 generators to keep CO2 at 3x to 4x ambient levels, at significant expense. That’s an increase 6 to 10 times as great as the measly ~125 ppmv increase which mankind’s fossil fuel use has caused in outdoor levels. Greenhouse operators spend the money to keep CO2 levels that high because doing so dramatically improves the growth of most plants. If the modest increase in outdoor CO2 levels were making crops significantly less nutritious, then crops grown in greenhouses at dramatically higher CO2 levels would necessarily be dramatically less nutritious than crops grown outdoors.
But they aren’t, of course. Food grown in greenhouses at elevated CO2 levels has about the same nutritional value as food grown in open fields at ambient CO2 levels.
The faster crops grow, the more nutrients they need. Farmers know that, and fertilize accordingly (or, for nitrogen, they may plant legumes — which, fortunately, benefit greatly from extra CO2). But if you fail to follow best agricultural practices, and don’t fertilize according to the needs of your crops, then the result may be reductions in protein and/or micronutrient levels in the resulting crops.
The cause of those reductions is not higher CO2 levels, the cause is poor agricultural practices.
Inadequate nitrogen fertilization reduces protein production relative to carbohydrate production, because proteins contain nitrogen and carbohydrates don’t. Here’s a relevant paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2773101/
Human activities (mostly fossil fuel use) have raised outdoor CO2 levels by about 125 ppmv, from about 280 ppmv to the current 405 ppmv. By comparison, commercial greenhouses typically use CO2 generators to keep CO2 levels at 1200 to 1500 ppmv, which is an increase 6 to 9 times as great.
Greenhouse operators spend the money to keep CO2 levels that high because doing so dramatically improves the growth of most plants, a fact which has been known to science for a century. Here’s an article about it from Scientific American way back in 1920; they called anthropogenic CO2 “the precious air fertilizer!”
http://tinyurl.com/1920sciamCO2
Here’s an excellent literature review on the topic:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/p/summaries/protein.php
Excerpt:
It is possible to contrive conditions in which CO2 fertilization reduces levels of some nutrients, but under real-world conditions, with farmers utilizing established agricultural best practices, additional CO2 is dramatically beneficial for agriculture, to levels far beyond what we can ever hope to reach in the outdoor atmosphere, and the nutrient value of crops grown with extra CO2, either in greenhouses (with dramatically elevated CO2 levels), or outdoors (with modestly elevated CO2 levels), is not significantly different from other crops.
Here are some additional references:
1. doi:10.1071/PP9960253
2. doi:10.1016/s0167-8809(98)00185-6
3. doi:10.1046/j.1469-8137.2001.00107.x
typo: “won’t not follow” should be “will not follow”.
(Sorry, there’s no “edit” button when a comment goes through moderation.)
Greenhouse comparisons are valid if the environmental conditions are exactly similar, ad well as CO2 levels. Even without factoring in CO2 levels higher temperatures & irradiance (light) produces some tomatoes with less sucrose & more hexose content; the sweet spot (~21-26°C, depending on cultivar) that produces the nicest sugar profile can be tightly regulated in a greenhouse unlike out in the field.
It would be interesting to review any comparison between ambient CO2 field vegetable & it in greenhouse bumped up CO2 that consistantly match their light & heat environment. Just to give perspective (without regard to CO2) the free full text is available on-line for Gautier, et al’s (2008) ” How does tomato quality (sugar, acid, and nutritional quality) vary with ripening state, temperature and irradiance”.
To be clear I’ll repeat what commented earlier. The extra greenhouse CO2 is very useful for ameliorating the usually undesirable impact of low seasonal light.
By now most have heard that eCO2 grown wheat has less gluten protein. What is less understood is that eCO2 grains develop to have a higher alpha-amylase enzyme content. The amount of this enzyme is a factor in how well wheat stores, when there is more of this enzyme in a grain that is not favorable for longest storage. Of course all that is needed everywhere would be improved storage conditions’ control.
I always read how fertiler application rates can simply be increased to compensate for any alteration from elevated CO2 (or barring that people can just take supplements. In gringolandia most of my farming neighbors already struggle to finance seasonal production & buying extra fertilizer would not be as feasible as it sounds.
Guess I should say this again: I am not decrying CO2, just think there are aspects worthy of thinking critically about since commercial greenhouses need context. I’ll also refer anyone interested, who may have missed it, to the lettuce comparison in my earlier comments above.
I’ve had time to check the given links. The 3rd used the equivalent of 350 kg of supplemental nitrogen (“high-N”) per hectare under elevated CO2 (eCO2 of 550ppm) to ameliorate grain protein loss. I won’t price 350 kg of nitrogen fertilizer or go into issues of nitrogen leaching in fields when might try to put that into widespread practise.
In experiments conducted where dry land wheat farming is done & when the actual soil
involved already has “adequate” nitrogen (ie: not where nitrogen is otherwise deficient) quite different results are seen. With 550 ppm CO2 an additional 50-60 kg / hectare nitrogen bumps up straw’s nitrogen % (as tested by dry weight) more notably than anything else.
There was no remarkable equalizing effect on grain protein “dilution” under eCO2 in good (ie: crop land of suitable nitrogen for current CO2 grown wheat) dry land soil when provide supplemental nitrogen at an affordable level. For specific comparative ratios of grain protein discussed here see Fig. 1 of (2017) “Can additional N fertilizer ameliorate the elevated CO2-induced depression in grain and tissue concentrations of wheat on a high soil N background”; free full pdf available on-line.
Great post, Dave.
But they aren’t, of course. Food grown in greenhouses at elevated CO2 levels has about the same nutritional value as food grown in open fields at ambient CO2 levels.
Their inductive hypotheses and models predict nutrient-poor crops from elevated CO2. But deductive evidence – under their noses every day in the food that they eat, says that it isn’t true.
But they cling to the inductive and willfully ignore the deductive.
Karl Popper was right to warn about such as these. They bring no science, only dismal stories.
Made up crap posing as science.
‘a core principle of planetary health’.
Now that’s what I call: hubris on a planetary scale.
But most of us already throw away the nutrition in wheat and rice when we eat white, not wholemeal kinds. So this ‘fact’ is in fact a lie.
Let’s see if I live in India, walk everywhere, can’t keep food more than a day or so, spend a great deal of time growing food and my family just has enough to eat and sometimes not. Yet if I had access to cheap and plentiful energy I could have modern conveniences. I could produce more food, my family would get more to eat, spend less time when travel was required and I could even keep food for a week or more. My children could be better educated. And my family’s lives wouldn’t be shortened due to burning dung. Gee, I wonder what I would chose?
I always find it ironic that the same people that produced this study most probably oppose GMO food.
“It has been shown that higher atmospheric levels of CO2result in less nutritious crop yields, with concentrations of protein, iron, and zinc being 3%-17% lower when crops are grown in environments where CO2concentrations are 550 parts per million (ppm) compared with crops grown under current atmospheric conditions, in which CO2 levels are just above 400 ppm.”
Couldn’t people just eat 3 to 17% more veggies/meal to make up the lost nutrients?
Also, doesn’t this study assume that people are eating just enough of their veggies to get the exact amount of nutrients they require? I bet the vast majority of people in the world (excluding kids) eat more then enough veggies/day and hence, are getting excess nutrients.
And this makes me think we need a global authority to make sure each of us eats the exact (and same amount globally per capita) amount of veggies in order to get the exact amount of nutrients we require. /sarc
‘could result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient . . . by 2050’
A risk I’m willing to take.
Dave is right. I thought exactly the same but too busy debunking other alarmist deceits to tackle this one. Eat more of the slightly depleted food? My wife now understands. When I she sees some bizarre pointless “science on the BBC, she says, “…..must have been able to get a grant for it”. Without the funding, this prsumptive half baked pseudo science(science no one can prove) would stop. Dead. It’s the people feeding the catastrophe prophestying feamonster that cause the bad science (BS). And create a career for middleclass rich kids who don’t want to work in the real world of value adding, where what you say and make have to work as advertised, or you go to jail.
As CO2 levels climb, millions at risk of nutritional deficiencies.
_____________________________________________________
but the urgent problem is:
If fewer and fewer SUVs are used for the benefit of electric bikes, not enough toilet paper will be transported in family households. To the detriment of civil hygiene.
https://www.google.at/amp/news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/01/low-flow-toilets-cause-stink-in-san-francisco/amp/
As it happens we have empirical evidence to test this assertion that socialism is superior to capitalism for saving the natural environment. David Legates points out recent historical examples where two modern societies were split, one part to develop for 50 years under a socialist autocracy and the other part under a free market democracy. What can we learn from these two experiments: North/South Korea and East/West Germany?
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/08/27/socialist-snow-job/
As long as these foods are “processed” by cattle, pigs, chickens, roe deer, there is absolutely no problem.
The real problem remains with the vegans.
This is the real reason why the Greens want to prohibit us from eating meat – to get rid of us.
This is easily disputed when a person considers a few of the basic to growing vegetables for food nutrients. As plants grow more abundantly (under higher CO2 levels in nature) the increase in plant “substance/life” will put a bigger demand on the soils thus more nutrients are taken out of the soil. When the levels are not replaced that was taken out by the last crop the plants will naturally be of lesser value.
Now with that said CO2 itself has a habit of replacing the nutrients that is not present (which and in what amounts I’m not aware of at this time but going on what I have witnessed personally), but then again most people don’t seem to understand that farmers do NOT put back into the soil everything the plants take out as it grows THAT IS THE BIGGEST REASON PLANTS ARE LACKING IN TRACE ELEMENTS.
(Sorry for the caps that last part but nobody wants to listen to logic and reason anymore)
When nutrients are made in the factory they basically use to base elements that will make a plant grow, in nature the soil contains many other elements and that is where you get your nutrients from by way of the simple plant. When you constantly farm the same soil year after year non-stop without putting back in all those nutrients that get taken out each year your plants are not going to have the nutrient levels you expects.
Simple chemistry actually, you can’t extract and expect the whole to remain the same
I think Ben Franklin started a college that is still open if memory serve, there in the Ag. Dept. I think the man say they have a test plot that has been used every year since the college open with each section labeled by year and you can see the difference in corn grow from now to the year the college started.