Will rising carbon dioxide levels really boost plant growth?

Plants have become an unlikely subject of political debate. Many projections suggest that burning fossil fuels and the resulting climate change will make it harder to grow enough food for everyone in the coming decades. But some groups opposed to limiting our emissions claim that higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) will boost plants’ photosynthesis and so increase food production.

New research published in Science suggests that predicting the effects of increasing CO₂ levels on plant growth may actually be more complicated than anyone had expected.

To understand what the researchers have found out requires a bit of background information about photosynthesis. This is the process that uses light energy to power the conversion of CO₂ into the sugars that fuel plant growth and ultimately provide the food we depend on. Unfortunately, photosynthesis is flawed.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Senior Lecturer in Plant Biochemistry from the University of Westminster, Stuart Thompson - “Will rising carbon dioxide levels really boost plant growth?”

The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis

(This is part three of a work in progress. The series begins with The Last Decade and You, and continues with On Climate, Speed is Everything.

In the last two pieces, I pointed out how getting on the right emissions reduction curve for this era means taking bold action, now. We must peak global emissions by 2020. Then we must cut them in half by 2030 — and then cut them in half again by 2040, and then again, by 2050 — while restoring the natural world and spreading sustainable prosperity. 

Because the planetary crisis is steepening — the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to solve the problems we face — failing to get on the right curve will mean that we end up, very quickly, on an even steeper curve. Wait too long and the curves we face become essentially impossible to meet.

We can fail catastrophically on climate. We’ll know that failure when we have delayed action so long that we find ourselves confronting an insurmountable emissions reduction challenge coupled with rising and untenable losses — a crisis where all humanity’s choices are bad ones. We will have then reached a point where a even drastic program of global carbon austerity — even when combined with our wildest gambles on trying to pull CO2 out of the air and engineer the planet’s temperature — will simply not be enough to avoid tragic, essentially permanent losses for all humanity.

Read the story by Alex Steffen - “The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis.”