A new study published in Science reveals that the fertilizing effect of excess CO2 on vegetation is decreasing worldwide
SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (CSIC)
When plants absorb this gas to grow, they remove it from the atmosphere and it is sequestered in their branches, trunk or roots. An article published today in Science shows that this fertilizing effect of CO2 is decreasing worldwide, according to the text co-directed by Professor Josep Peñuelas of the CSIC at CREAF and Professor Yongguan Zhang of the University of Nanjin, with the participation of CREAF researchers Jordi Sardans and Marcos Fernández. The study, carried out by an international team, concludes that the reduction has reached 50% progressively since 1982 due basically to two key factors: the availability of water and nutrients. “There is no mystery about the formula, plants need CO2, water and nutrients in order to grow. However much the CO2 increases, if the nutrients and water do not increase in parallel, the plants will not be able to take advantage of the increase in this gas”, explains Professor Josep Peñuelas. In fact, three years ago Prof. Peñuelas already warned in an article in Nature Ecology and Evolution that the fertilising effect of CO2 would not last forever, that plants cannot grow indefinitely, because there are other factors that limit them.
If the fertilizing capacity of CO2 decreases, there will be strong consequences on the carbon cycle and therefore on the climate. Forests have received a veritable CO2 bonus for decades, which has allowed them to sequester tons of carbon dioxide that enabled them to do more photosynthesis and grow more. In fact, this increased sequestration has managed to reduce the CO2 accumulated in the air, but now it is over. “These unprecedented results indicate that the absorption of carbon by vegetation is beginning to become saturated. This has very important climate implications that must be taken into account in possible climate change mitigation strategies and policies at the global level. Nature’s capacity to sequester carbon is decreasing and with it society’s dependence on future strategies to curb greenhouse gas emissions is increasing”, warns Josep Peñuelas.
The study published in Science has been carried out using satellite, atmospheric, ecosystem and modelling information. It highlights the use of sensors that use near-infrared and fluorescence and are thus capable of measuring vegetation growth activity.
Less water and nutrients
According to the results, the lack of water and nutrients are the two factors that reduce the capacity of CO2 to improve plant growth. To reach this conclusion, the team based itself on data obtained from hundreds of forests studied over the last 40 years. “These data show that concentrations of essential nutrients in the leaves, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, have also progressively decreased since 1990,” explains researcher Songhan Wang, the first author of the article.
The team has also found that water availability and temporal changes in water supply play a significant role in this phenomenon. “We have found that plants slow down their growth, not only in times of drought, but also when there are changes in the seasonality of rainfall, which is increasingly happening with climate change,” explains researcher Yongguan Zhang.
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Reference article:
Wang S, Zhang YG, Ju W, Chen, J, Ciais P, Cescatti A, Sardans J, Janssens IA, Sardans, J, Fernández-Martínez, M, … Penuelas J (2020). Recent global decline of CO2 fertilization effects on vegetation photosynthesis. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb7772
In the 21st century people became so scared of the sky gods wrath, that they started sacrificing people who were deemed heavy breathers in a seemingly vain attempt at appeasement. Such was the delusion.
The climatocene carboniferous was thankfully a relatively short period in human history.
From the article: ““We have found that plants slow down their growth, not only in times of drought, but also when there are changes in the seasonality of rainfall, which is increasingly happening with climate change,”
Nothing is increasingly happening with [Human-caused] climate change because there is no evidence establishing Human-caused Climate Change exists, therefore it can’t be causing anything to be happening increasingly.
You have to establish that something exists before you can establish that it is having an effect. Saying climate change is having an effect when you haven’t established that it exists, is not science.
Every study that includes climate change has some wild, unsubstantiated claim like this. It’s pathetic the amount of misinformation that is put out about Human-caused Climate Change by supposedly reputable scientists.
A reputable scientist should have some basis for making claims. Climate scientists make wild claim based on nothing but speculation.
Alarmist Climate Science has been totally corrupted by greed and groupthink.
I don’t have access to the study to find the database(s) they referenced. I suspect data torture and confirmation bias. I have a hard time believing there is enough high quality data over 40 years, both temporally and spatially, to make that claim. Anyone up for debunking this one?
As I mentioned above, the original article is available on Sci-Hub here …
w.
Thanks Willis
I looked at the paper, it can be summed up in one sentence.
We won’t let CO2 greening stop our climate alarmist power-grab.
Lack of water? There’s oceans of it.
Lack of nutrients? There’s continents of it.
These clowns are trying to force the narrative toward sequestration of CO2 and shutting down fossil fuels, which would devastate earth’s economy.
It sounds like they’re playing into the hands of the Great Reset right on cue!
“This has very important climate implications that must be taken into account” That is if you believe that CO2 the big boogyman the environmentalist claim it is. There is too much evidence to suggest nature has a way of handling the on-going increase in CO2. The study of climate is a very complex and in reality we probably will never fully understand it. One more attempt for man to take their turn at building a modern day Towel of Babel.
Even if it’s true that the trees will not grow much faster at some point due to increased CO2 (and I don’t believe that)- with better forest management- the trees WILL grow faster- that’s a fact that I can attest to after almost half a century of being a professional forester- because with proper thinning- we remove slow growing, unhealthy trees.
Faster growing kinds trees are not known for more dense wood than the kinds of slow growing trees & as such proportionately hold less carbon. In the Amazon west the trees are of the significantly faster growing kinds partial to more light than dominant slow growing trees in the eastern Amazon.
And, since the 1980s, researchers have collected a data trend of increasing bio-mass mortality in the Amazon which is not blamed on people. The faster growing trees die more quickly & on the ground their carbon is tied up in the tree dead matter for quite awhile; making it so that there is more carbon in the dead litter than in the standing fast growing tree sector.
Casual observation might mistakenly assume the whole sector is thriving since see fresh stems in small areas, but the actual number of stems won’t be higher. Those fast growing Amazon tree’s bases will be down in size & there will be a lot more vines (elevated CO2, by the way, significantly favors vine growth).
“Faster growing kinds trees are not known for more dense wood than the kinds of slow growing trees & as such proportionately hold less carbon.”
I’ll focus- here in the American northeast- if we compare the rate of growth of white pine to say, poplar, white and grey birches, red maple, hemlock and others- the pine will grow far faster and put on more weight of carbon. So, with intelligent management- foresters can leave more pine on the site and remove those slower growing species. White pine is also more valuable than those other species so it’s a twofer. Another example- leaving red oak compared to those and other species: the oak may not grow faster but it’ll live longer and is less likely to have internal decay which loses carbon. So, my suggestion that with good forestry- we can have more carbon in the forests AND more economic value which is necessary for private forest owners to retain their woodlands as woodlands- rather than selling to developers, or God forbid, to install industrial sized solar “farm” which utterly destroy the forest! Every region will be different- but experienced foresters can factor in a desire to increase carbon in the forest while also considering economics. We aren’t going to dedicate all the forests on the planet to just carbon storage, though there are some people who want that. Not gonna happen.
And with no less than 36 authors, this confirms Willis’s Rule of Authorship, which states:
where V is the scientific value of the study, and A is the number of authors.
w.
Ha
Good one. Here’s an example- as a forester, I recently read a peer reviewed paper that said the largest 1% of trees in a forest have half the biomass. That’s absurd. It had 99 coauthors! When I bitch about that paper, some people say, “but it has a 99 coauthors- so it must be right!”
I would be curious to know what the authors think about the Carboniferous.
Ditto. Is a time machine available so that we could take those bozos back to that epoch and give them a tour?
Having dabbled in a little paleontology, seems to me I recall seeing that during the time of the dinosaurs ferns grew 30 feet tall. Think of what it took to feed a race of those monster dinosaurs, they never would have survived on our puny plant growth today. Turns out, CO2 levels were much higher back then.
I saw a study recently on the age of coal, and it showed that a great many of our current coal deposits date to the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Read about the devastation that extinction meteor caused. It leveled and charred forests worldwide, thereby creating the coal and removing the CO2 from our atmosphere.
One other problem with the above – adaptation. It took the plants a while to adapt to the lower CO2 levels, and it will take some time for full adaptation to significantly higher levels. I haven’t yet heard of significant increases in the height of ferns.
I don’t think so.! The greenhouse effect hasn’t reached 1000 ppm like the greenhouses use.
There is more greening to come. This article must be from the CAGW people.
They don’t like any good/positive effects from CO2.
– JPP
The positive effects of CO2 are an embarrassment and difficult to explain away … in exactly the same way the Medieval Warm Period was (hence the “Hockey Stick” graph). It’s just one of the steps to controlling the entire dialogue prescribed by Geo. Orwell … “”1984” and “Animal Farm” (for reference).
“The greening of the earth is approaching its limit.”
“ The stupidity of the earth is approaching its limit.”
There, fixed it….
Even if this were true and you’re worried about, just plant a lot more trees where there is adequate water and nutrients – more greening and more sequestered CO2, a win-win for the bed-wetting eco-loons.
“just plant a lot more trees ”
Nature is more than capable of doing that all on its own 🙂
The authors are terrified that CO2 greening will threaten their beloved climate warming. The paper’s all about defending their global warming from the perceived “danger” from greening.
They show no sign whatever of being able to contemplate the idea that greening of ecosystems such as desert might be a good thing. In the paper they use the ugly technical term “ forcing of terrestrial carbon sinks” to mean the enrichment of vitality of green plants. It looks very much like a death cult. Looking at life they see only death.
I’m confused about something.
This “paper” indicates a baseless phobia about CO2, with the notion that plants can only absorb “just so much” CO2 (hogwash), and yet I see constant physical evidence that contradicts that notion.
So my confusion stems from what seems to be a lack of real-time observations OUTSIDE THE CONFOUNDED LAB/BUILDING, and these people get paid to do this.
So, to clear up my confusion, does anyone besides me have an idea how to prove to the money-grubbers that they are wrong, without stirring up a civil war?
Oh, wait – maybe we should do just that?
Has anyone ever really measured the O2 volume in a dense forest or jungle area, and then compared it to outside that spot, where vegetation is thinner? Or would that be too hard?
Not only is CO2 an unmitigated benefit to the biosphere through plant greening:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/co2-fertilisation-and-the-greening-of-the-sahara/
as shown in the record global harvest of 2019-2020:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/world-wheat-crop-heads-for-new-record/
It also turns out that rising CO2 perhaps unexpectedly increases the oxygenation of the deepest ocean:
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/14/atmospheric-co2-is-good-for-the-deep-ocean/
Protecting against the danger of ocean anoxia, the cause of the most deadly mass extinctions such as the end-Permian, which was associated with low, not high, CO2.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43630
https://notrickszone.com/2018/05/28/2-new-papers-permian-mass-extinction-coincided-with-global-cooling-falling-sea-levels-and-low-co2/
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1126891477857198081
The thing is that there are positive feedbacks in that the increased CO2 also improves the health of soils. There is a positive feedback and that as plants demand less resources to ensure good chances of survival and procreation, they share more resources (particularly water and sugars) with symbiotic organisms like fungi and bacteria in soil. This improves the ability of soil to be resilient in regards to heat and water. The soils are better at retaining water, and the bacteria and fungi actually increase the availability of bio-available nitrogen and phosphorus. The weak link is availability of phosphorus to convert to a bio-available form. But there are only hints of limits in certain parts of the Amazon. Most likely what is actually happening is confusion of effects of changes in El Niño with limits to production bio-available phosphorus.
Good point – soil health is also benefitted by CO2.
It’s a good thing that CO2 and warming increase both the availability of water and other nutrients.
The thing is that there are positive feedbacks in that the increased CO2 also improves the health of soils. There is a positive feedback and that as plants demand less resources to ensure good chances of survival and procreation, they share more resources (particularly water and sugars) with symbiotic organisms like fungi and bacteria in soil. This improves the ability of soil to be resilient in regards to heat and water. The soils are better at retaining water, and the bacteria and fungi actually increase the availability of bio-available nitrogen and phosphorus. The weak link is availability of phosphorus to convert to a bio-available form. But there are only hints of limits in certain parts of the Amazon. Most likely what is actually happening is confusion of effects of changes in El Niño with limits to production bio-available phosphorus.
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1126891477857198081