“…elevated CO2 concentrations not only boosted vegetation growth through the fertilizer effect but also indirectly enhanced water availability [reducing drought risk] by improving water use efficiency.” – Song et al., 2024
One of the more commonly-stated concerns linked to “global warming” is that sweltering heat will parch the terrestrial landscape (browning), limit vegetation growth, and foment water shortages – even widespread drought.
However, a new study suggests the Earth’s rising CO2 concentration has the exact opposite effect in the real world.
In their extensive trend analysis spanning the last few decades, the scientists determined elevated CO2 was the single most “dominant driver” (accounting for 45% of the correlation) when assessing the link between reducing vegetation water demand and improved water use efficiency.
Compared to CO2, temperature and precipitation, for example, play a far less significant role (10-11% of the correlation) in influencing the trend in improved vegetation growth and water use efficiency.
“The CO2 fertilization effect has benefits for both vegetation growth and water use efficiency (WUE).”
“…elevated CO2 concentrations could indirectly enhance water availability by improving [water use efficiency]…reducing vegetation water demand.”
Image Source: Song et al., 2024
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You would hardly call H2O a fertilizer, so why call CO2 a fertilizer?
They are both the feedstocks of life on earth. Credit
It’s called Photosynthesis
How plants take in CO2, transform the C into Carbohydrates for energy and GROWTH and respire the remaining O2. The “C” portion of atmospheric CO2 IS a major factor in plant growth. Like Nitrogen in the soil, CO2 in atmosphere IS a fertilizer
“… CO2 in atmosphere IS a fertilizer.”
___________________________________________________________
CO2 + H20 ==> Sunshine==> Carbohydrates. CO2 is just as important as H2O for life on Earth, CO2 IS way more than mere fertilizer. Every carbon atom in your body was once in the atmosphere as CO2.
The war on CO2 has been raging for over 40 years. The absolute importance of CO2 in the air needs to be pointed out. Fertilizers are needed but in only in small amounts. Any gardener knows that over use of fertilizer becomes counterproductive. Not so with CO2. More is better, we are a long long long way from CO2 being too much. Submarines run CO2 as much as ten times what is currently in our atmosphere. I could go on.
Semantics, semantics, semantics…
Though it’s still a necessity component And the biosphere does better with increased levels
It’s not just that the biosphere does better with increased levels, but at or below 150 ppm ALL PLANT LIFE DIES. Which is the end of all terrestrial animal life too. So no, it is not a fertilizer, it is the essence of life. All the carbon in you, and all animal life arose from CO2 in the atmosphere!
Nitrogen and other elements are fertilizers. CO2 is a basic building block, therefore a nutrient.
Accuracy and correct terminology are essential in science.
I sit corrected
Actually, the oxygen comes from water. They traced the reactions of the various components years ago.
hmmm… you’re saying that the oxygen released by plants comes from water and not CO2?
interesting- but then what happens to the O2 attached to the C?
It’s easy to look up. For example:
To quote: “In plant photosynthesis, the energy of light is used to drive the oxidation [they mean reduction–water is already oxidized] of water (H2O), producing oxygen gas (O2), hydrogen ions (H+), and electrons. Most of the removed electrons and hydrogen ions ultimately are transferred to carbon dioxide (CO2), which is reduced to organic products.”
I never thought about that way, but you are right. CO2 is for respiration, Nitrogen is fertilizer.
Thanks for seeing things logically 🙂
Sort of like calling oxygen a “nutrient” to humans.
But all change from the Little Ice Age is a Bad Thing, isn’t it?
Cold kills, warmth makes me want to be alive and pursue happiness
To hell with the IPCC and thousands of other criminal entities spewing nonsense, already since 1990
The primary “greenhouse effect” that increased CO2 provides is increased vegetation and growth vigor. Kind of ironic that this knowledge has been used by greenhouse horticulturalists around the world for many decades.
I’ll file this report under “Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious”
It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know. What was the point of it?
“”The extent of the greening over the past 35 years “has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system,””
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-earth-greenerfor-now/
Factions attempting to abandon a doom narrative that has become a millstone.
It is obvious to a relatively small percentage of the population. Any “News” organizations do not promote it because it is not “politically” correct and there is no money available for research that studies the positive values of CO2 and no politician can gain votes or money by promoting the benefits of CO2. It is refreshing to have research available for ALL OF US to distribute to those not following subjects like this. They are spending more time on non-environmental oriental sites.
”
sunk-cost fallacy
noun
the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.”
Like many investment schemes the newest participants will be found holding a bag.
“It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know. What was the point of it?”
______________________________________________________
It’s called advertising. Putting out the message just once and expecting
everyone to receive and understand it, isn’t realistic.
You probably learned CO2 + H2O = Sugar in 6th grade science. So
have most people. They need be reminded of what they learned
and think about what it means. It doesn’t mean what the Democrats
and the Main Stream Media are telling us.
The Dems think CO2 is a toxic, Earth destroying pollutant.
Uhhhh …. “sweltering” means hot AND HUMID. How anyone who has ever even visited a humid climate can think it dry is beyond my comprehension.
Another reason why the global average air temperature tells nothing about climate.
yes. curiously, using a thermometer, humid climates have relatively cooler temperatures compared to an equivalent arid climate. Ultimately, arid regions are typically warmer due to the stronger solar heating in the absence of clouds.
Not just clouds. Water dampens (pardon the pun) the amplitude of the range of temperature.
True. but ultimately at the thermodynamic boundaries more moist static energy is associated with more cloud. This is the ultimate control on the energy budget.
And colder at night too.
Visited? Why visit when you can model?
Given the eugenics agenda of the Warmunists, no wonder they’re at war with more hospitable conditions to humans.
My Camaro ZL1, Dodge Ram 2500, AC and I would like to say, “You’re welcome!”
More CO2 ==> more photosynthesis ==> more photons captured to produce carbohydrates instead of heat and more cooling of the near surface by biomass transpiration :
Forest canopies cool the land.
Why else would people sit under a tree in the shade to cool off.
Forests increase the surface net radiation Rnet which must be balanced by increased thermodynamic turbulent flux. Forest canopy is included as part of the surface.
Curiously, places with the most turbulent flux (and highest surface net radiation) are cooler than equivalent latitudes with low turbulent flux magnitude and relatively low surface net radiation.
Additionally, turbulent flux magnitude, and therefore surface net radiation, are proportional to the difference between surface temperature (Ts) and the outgoing radiation temperature observed from space (Tr) in local profiles.
Hot deserts have relatively small Ts – Tr, small relative greenhouse effects, and higher temperature compared to a rainforest with high Ts – Tr, high turbulent flux, and high greenhouse effect.
Variation in turbulent flux is anti-correlated with surface temperature. Therefore variation in Ts -Tr is anti-correlated with surface temperature too.
Surface net radiation Rnet is the sum of surface net SW (net down) and surface net LW (up and out to space). Rnet ≈ Turbulent flux.
More turbulent flux is associated with more cloud. A lower Rnet is associated with less cloud, less greenhouse effects (Ts – Tr), and higher surface temperature. A higher Rnet is associated with more cloud and lower surface temperature.
This is all much more interesting than considering greenhouse effects alone. In many ways, the reality outside is counterintuitive based on the way climate teaching is framed exclusively through radiative greenhouse effects.
Shielding the ground from sunlight means less energy is stored in the ground for keeping the night warm.
Surface net radiation and turbulent flux is higher in humid cloudy places while heat storage (mainly in the boundary layer above land) is lower. You love this kinda thing.
Yields of agricultural commodities are increasing. This year, prices are dropping.
A common effect of the law of supply and demand.
News is allowing positivity during election season.
Yet another Chinese paper running against the alarmist tide!
Did anyone fully literate not know this already?
See my post above
We should include this:
It has been estimated that if we collected all the fossil fuels available in the world today and put them in one big pile and burned all of it up at one time that this would about double the amount of CO2 in the air right now, which means the total would be less than about 900ppm.
That’s about the most that humans can do when it comes to putting CO2 in the atmosphere.
CO2 at 900ppm is not a problem for humans or animals or plants.
There is no CO2/Climate Crisis. It is a figment of Climate Alarmists’ imagination.
That’s just a little more than doubling today’s CO2 concentration. Which might cause around a degree of warming. Thanks for pointing that our. A linky pooh to the source where you saw that would be great. See the link below to Dr. James Hansen where he says it would be around 1.2°C.
IPCC AR4 Chapter 8 page 631 pdf 43
“Which might cause around a degree of warming.”
Or it might not. No-one has been able to produce any empirical evidence that enhanced atmospheric CO2 causes any warming.
Specific heat Cp of CO2 is slightly less than air. Adding CO2 means 1J per mol has a slightly higher temperature.
That is empirically proven. It is nearly trivial, but non-zero and will not lead to a burning earth.
Totally immeasurable in the atmosphere…and will have zero effect on anything.
Still a hypothetical ceiling, still in reality a non-factor, and still 100% beneficial if it happened.
Hansen’s “trains of death” (coal trains) are, in reality, “trains of LIFE.”
“It has been estimated….”
I’d like to see those estimates.
All other things held equal. Which means that would be the ceiling of the hypothetical effect.
Feedbacks being negative, the actual effect probably couldn’t be differentiated from zero.
Only in “Modelworld” is there positive feedback dominating the Earth’s temperature/climate.
Here in reality, CO2 has never had a demonstrated effect on the Earth’s temperature. An ice age with ten times today’s atmospheric CO2 level 450 mya definitively tells us that, as does repeated occurrences of reverse correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 in the ice core reconstructions. And methane is a complete non-factor because its residence time is small and its absorption bands completely overlapped by the main greenhouse gas, water vapor.
And if you think the greenhouse effect in totality will ever be controlled by human activities when the main greenhouse gas is water vapor and more than 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered in oceans of WATER, you have lost your connection to reality.
Also: “…elevated CO2 concentrations could indirectly enhance water availability by improving [water use efficiency]…reducing vegetation water demand.” assumes the same quantity of vegetation.
How is this greening and the radiation budget connected? Is the conversion of CO2 into plant mass accounted for?