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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (141877)	10/5/2005 9:33:47 PM
From: Brian Sullivan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793896

That article is surprisingly light on any real fact or details. The one key sentence in the article is 100% wrong on the role plants play in influencing the CO2 content: These measurements, precise to less than a millimeter, recently revealed that during warmer years, the trees grew less, died more, and expelled more carbon dioxide. Plants actually consume carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. I'm not sure how one would use tree-ring patters to measure how much carbon dioxide is being expelled by a tree. Perhaps the article meant to say that the trees ingest less carbon dioxide, but somehow I doubt it. The article seems to be written by another eco-nutter to me.

To: carranza2 who wrote (141877)	10/6/2005 12:09:55 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 793896

As I expected C2, there's no need to revise my CO2 theory. Plants love eating CO2 and more of it means more growth. That's why commercial crop growers with glasshouses buy gas to burn to warm and increase the CO2 content in them. Which is not to say that always, an increased CO2 level will increase the rate of growth in every plant on Earth. Plants are more or less in balance with their surroundings. A cactus in Arizona has as its greatest issue the availability of water. So, they don't have a lot of leaf area and they don't grow really tall to compete with each other for sun. They hug the ground and have a very high body mass index [they are obese]. Giving them more CO2 or more sunshine isn't going to be a big deal for them. But if they have plenty of water, they are going to use more CO2 and more sunshine. I guess they start sprouting when it gets wet. When it's dry, I suppose they stay hunkered down. In a wet tropical forest, where water is NOT an issue, but lack of CO2 and lack of sunshine are, the trees will reach for the sky, shading competitors. They'll have big leaves to absorb more CO2. They'll use water profligately. <“A major, tacit assumption, I think, of 90 percent of us working at La Selva was that we were working in a tropical rain forest, which means equitable climate, which means every year’s the same,” says Clark. However, the new finding, she says, “made it very clear to us that, if our forest is very sensitive to small, inter-year differences in climate, it’s certainly going to be affected with these global changes going on right now.”> Of course things are in balance for given conditions. When CO2 is boosted, that will favour plants which can use the extra CO2 and penalize plants which can't. The CO2 gobblers will flourish and the others will die. Forests and other plants won't just stay the same. More water, more sun, or more CO2 will favour some and punish others. If other nutrients are an issue, they will be part of the equation too. <The world’s climate could be entering what she calls “very scary territory,” in which the rise in global temperature, along with accompanying drought, could inflict enormous damage to tropical forests and increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere.> Mass droughts would indeed be a big problem. So would mass glaciation. Both would cause mass plant death. Mass glaciation is much more scary than doubled CO2 levels. Another glaciation would be good for Egyptians. They could reconstitute their days of glory from 4000 years ago when things were more lush in the area. <Many ecologists had assumed that tropical forests would grow faster with higher levels of carbon dioxide, buffering the global increase in the greenhouse gas. In contrast, the scenario the Clarks' research hints at -- in which the death of tropical forests increases carbon dioxide rise and global warming -- has been ominously named the Armageddon Model.> With more CO2, tropical forest plants would grow faster, because the sunshine would enable a greater conversion rate. Of course if the tropical forests instead died due to drought, then there would be an increase in CO2 during decomposition. There have only been about 30 years, but observations from space should shown the total amount of chlorophyl seen from space. I wonder whether total terrestrial green has increased or decreased. Then there's the matter of oceanic green. There certainly isn't any drought in the oceans! So I dare say the conversion rate of CO2 to plants has increased in the oceans, and fresh water. Perhaps any decline in terrestrial green has been compensated for by increased oceanic green. I wonder whether oceanic green can be measured. More CO2 might increase temperatures, which it hasn't significantly, but it HAS increased CO2 and therefore plant growth. Therefore, so far, so good. Crop growers must be delighted with the free CO2 they are getting from the SUV brigade. Not only do they get free CO2, they often get taxpayer-funded subsidies. Meanwhile, no ice age! So we are doing very well from the CO2 increase. More plants, no ice age, no excessive temperature increase; imagine what might have happened if CO2 levels had NOT increased over the last 100 years...brrrrr..... Mqurice