Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/08/2008 6:55:18 PM PDT by Kaslin
Climate Change: A study on the impact of rising CO2 levels finds a future world of thriving agriculture and lush vegetation. Carbon dioxide, the gas some see as a threat, is indeed the key to life on Earth.
The Theunen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 1999, trained CO2 jets on plants, raising CO2 concentrations in the air around them to 550 parts per million (ppm), significantly higher than today's levels.
The researchers announced on Tuesday that such increased exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields.
"Output increased by about 10% for barley, beets and wheat" when the plants were exposed to the higher levels, according to the Institute's Hans-Joachim Weigel.
That the Earth is getting greener due to higher CO2 levels was confirmed recently by satellite data analyzed by scientists Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the earth's vegetation increased by a whopping 6.2%.
"Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates," explained Lawrence Solomon in a June 7 article on the Running/Nemani findings in Canada's Financial Post.
"Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century."
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Give that man a Pulitzer! He just rediscovered basic science 101.
The institute could’ve saved a lot of time by going to www.co2science.org.
This is old science - look up Dr. Sherwood Idso’s work. Some of his family also work in this field. His CO2/plant mass relationship work was done decades ago at the U. of Arizona.
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