Are There Also Benefits to More Carbon Dioxide in the Air? Yes, There Are

Carbon dioxide almost always get a bad rap for being a greenhouse gas, but did you know more CO2 in the atmosphere has caused plants to grow faster, causing global greening? The fact that CO2 spurs plant growth is well established, and it is also why greenhouses pump a lot carbon dioxide into nurseries to make plants grow faster and stronger.

According to a recent post by Patrick Michaels, a Ph.D. ecological climatology, on the blog, Climate Etc.

“Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau.

In other words, 78 [70 + 8] percent of observed planetary greening is caused by carbon dioxide and its effect upon climate.

We have repeatedly demonstrated (within here, for example) that about a half of a degree (C) of observed planetary warming is ascribable to anthropogenerated changes in the atmosphere. The main result appears to be a planet that is becoming so much greener that it is readily apparent from space.”

Greenhouse gas theory is well established, and human emissions have some impact on global temperatures, but the exact amount of warming CO2 causes is  the matter of a large amount of uncertainty. It’s important to keep in mind that CO2 is currently increasing production of crops through increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.