• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’ January 23, 2023
Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom January 23, 2023
IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia January 23, 2023
BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels January 17, 2023
Next
Prev

Plants’ carbon hunger won’t halt warming

November 18, 2016
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

The greenhouse effect has prompted plants to consume more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere − but not enough to prevent global warming.

LONDON, 18 November, 2016 − The green economy has begun to respond to a greenhouse world, with new research suggesting that the vegetable kingdom has stepped up its appetite for carbon dioxide as emissions continue to grow.

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
New!
Subscribe

The outcome is that although carbon dioxide proportions in the atmosphere have soared in less than two centuries, from 280 parts per million to 400 ppm now everywhere on the planet, the rate of increase has appeared to slow.

Unfortunately, the bad news from the researchers is that this increased appetite for carbon is nowhere near enough to halt human-induced climate change.

According to a study in Nature Communications, the rate at which CO2 increased in the atmosphere between 2002 and 2014 was contained at 1.9ppm per year. And researchers put this down to growing stimulus in the photosynthesis industry.

Fertilisation effect

In what is sometimes called the fertilisation effect, trees, grasses, shrubs, reeds and even crops have responded to the extra CO2 – the raw material for all plant growth – by taking in more carbon, sparking even more growth and thus more carbon consumption.

The same research confirmed another factor at work. Plant respiration − the process by which plants take in oxygen and release CO2 − did not increase at the same rate as photosynthesis.

This is because respiration responds to temperature, which was affected by the much-contended rate of slowdown in global warming in the early years of this century.

Overall, during the latter half of the 20th century, the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 climbed steadily. In 1959, it was 0.75ppm per year, and by 2002 this had risen to 1.86ppm. But since 2002, the growth has remained flat.

“This study highlights just how important it is
to protect natural vegetation so it continues
to absorb part of our carbon emissions”

Human numbers and economic expansion have continued to swell, and with it the overall emissions of CO2 as a consequence of the combustion of fossil fuels. So some of the expected growth was being consumed naturally.

“We believed one of the planet’s main carbon sinks had unexpectedly strengthened − but the question was, which one?” says Trevor Keenan, a climate and ecosystem scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

The oceans had been identified as one possible agent, but not the dominant cause. That left variations in carbon uptake and plant respiration as the other possible answer.

So the researchers got to work with a set of computer-based models, and these suggested that the increase in CO2 levels had prompted terrestrial plants to double their carbon uptake from between one and two billion tonnes a year in the 1950s to between two and four billion tonnes a year now.

Humans now release between 9 and 10 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gas annually. So the plants have slowed the rate of increase by stepping up their own activity.

Carbon uptake

“Unfortunately, this increase is nowhere near enough to stop climate change,” Dr Keenan says.

“We’ve shown that the increase in terrestrial carbon uptake is happening, and with a plausible explanation why. But we don’t exactly know where the carbon sink is increasing most, how long this increase will last, and what it means for the future of the Earth’s climate.”

Corinne le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in the UK, adds: “This study highlights just how sensitive the natural environment is to a changing climate and how important it is to protect natural vegetation so that it continues to absorb part of our carbon emissions.

“Fundamentally, though, the carbon sinks help, but their help is not enough to stop the planet warming. Carbon emissions have to drop to almost zero to stop global warming.” – Climate News Network



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
42
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
26
Western Arctic National Parklands/wikimedia commons
Arctic & Antarctica

Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop

January 2, 2023
27

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.1k
@tongbingxue/Twitter

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
269
Rachel Notley/Facebook

Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom

January 23, 2023
254
James Vincent Wardhaugh/flickr

Canada Sidelines Ontario’s Ring of Fire, Approves Separate Mining Project

December 4, 2022
379
Weirton, WV by Jon Dawson/flickr

IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia

January 23, 2023
493
United Nations

Salvage of $20B ‘Floating Time Bomb’ Delayed by Rising Cost of Oil Tankers

January 27, 2023
12

Recent Posts

EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
188
Sergio Boscaino/flickr

Dubai Mulls Quitting C40 Cities Over ‘Costly’ Climate Target

January 24, 2023
84
hangela/pixabay

New UK Coal Mine Faces Two Legal Challenges

January 24, 2023
43

Gas Stoves Enter U.S. Climate Culture War, Become ‘Bellwether’ for Industry

January 22, 2023
73
Jeff Hitchcock/flickr.

BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels

January 23, 2023
494

Exxon Had the Right Global Warming Numbers Through Decades of Denial: Study

January 17, 2023
223
Next Post

Cities suffer climate impacts in silence

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}