Reposted from The NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin on 7. May 2021
Almost everyone with even just a fraction of a science education knows Co2 is fertilizer to vegetation and that the added 100 or so ppm in our atmosphere over the past decades have been beneficial to plant growth and thus led to more greening of the continents.
Yet, some alarmists still sniff at this fact, or deny it.
More trees (+7%) and vegetation (+14%)
In the 34th climate video, Die kalte Sonne here reports on a recent German study by Merbach et al that looks at the question of just how beneficial the added CO2 has been to plant growth globally.
The authors’ findings: Over the past 100 years, there has been increased global vegetation growth.
“The global vegetation cover increased approximately 11- 14%, of which 70% can be attributed to the increased CO2 in the atmosphere,” reports Die kalte Sonne on the findings.
Another result: “Since 1982, the inventory of trees has increased more than 7%”.
Crop yields will rise by up to 15% by 2050
The news gets even better, the scientists show. Food production is expected to surge due to the increased amounts of CO2:
Chart source: Cropped here.
As the diagram above shows, crops such as soy bean (Soja), wheat (Weizen), rice (Reis) and corn (Mais) will surge as CO2 concentration rises to 550 ppm by 2050, thus lending a huge hand in feeding the planet’s growing population, which could reach 10 billion by mid century.
Germany: more than 30% higher crop yields since 1990
Another example cited is Germany: “From 1990 to 2015 in Germany, crop yields for wheat, barley, corn and potatoes rose more than 30%, which the researchers attribute in part to the higher CO2 concentrations,” Die kalte Sonne reports.
“The authors hope that the CO2-related crop yield increase will secure the food and feedstuffs production and contribute to feeding the world’s growing population.”
The study appeared in the Journal of Land Management, Food and Environment at the end of 2020.
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“Yet, some alarmists still sniff at this fact, or deny it.” And these people call others “deniers”.
Or is it more warmth and longer growing seasons? At the end of the last glacial maximum the temperatures rose and the growing seasons expanded and there was more rainfall. CO2 would have increased as a consequence of more vegetation. Is the extra 20/30 billion tons that humans produce sufficient to cause this? Of course farmers use elevated CO2 to improve growth but that can be more than double the natural atmospheric amount.
CO2 is plant food. This has been “known” since the 18th century.
So the CO2 alarmists must hate Green quite a lot.
CO2 increases plant growth and crop yields in the real world of 1920.
In this case, blast furnace effluent gas was diverted onto test plots and into greenhouses.
http://sealevel.info/ScientificAmerican_1920-11-27_CO2_fertilization.html
The new “Great green wall of Africa” will receive a significant boost – likely un-acknowledged of course – from CO2.
A green belt across the Sahara.
Here’s a link
https://youtu.be/7y77B1Y05SU
Not too long ago Facebook had a climate info page that said high CO2 levels harmed plants. I challenge them on that and other climate claims and they took them down
From the paragraph under the graph displayed in the above article:
“As the diagram above shows, crops . . . will surge as CO2 concentration rises to 550 ppm by 2050.”
Well, I was following the article and considered it to be good until I ran into that unsupported assertion about the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration. With the world’s atmosphere currently at about 416 ppm (Mauna Loa data), to rise to 550 ppm in 29 years would be a projected CO2 concentration rise rate about 4.6 ppm/year.
However, the actual rise rate of CO2 concentration over the last three years has been at 2.7 ppm/year and the acceleration in this parameter is very, very small. (ref: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ).
The above article gives no indication of why Merbach, et.al., authors of the study reported in Journal of Land Management, Food and Environment, would assert such a future rapid acceleration in atmospheric CO2 concentration, especially given that the “greening” of trees and vegetation that they focus on would, if continued, necessarily involve removing large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
TILT!