Tuesday, September 07, 2010

If plants are exposed to air containing trace amounts of CO2, will they wilt or go extinct?

Bees, flowers wilted by climate change: Study
"Scientists have raised the idea that one aspect of climate change would be this decoupling-in-time of species that interact," said James Thomson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto.

"It could be predators getting decoupled from their prey, it could be plants getting decoupled from insects that attack them or insects that serve them, like pollinators. My interpretation is that it is probably that kind of phenomenon."
...
While Thomson is careful to point out the findings apply to a specific set of circumstances, he said that the pattern is a concern to scientists. If found to repeat itself elsewhere, it could reduce fruit and seed production, and ultimately might cause plants to decline in number or even go extinct.
Low-Tech CO2 Enrichment for Greenhouse Vegetable Production
As best we can determine from Jin et al.'s graphs of hourly CO2 measurements made on specific days, as well as every-day or every-other-day measurements of CO2 made at one specific time of day, mean daylight CO2 concentrations in the CO2-enriched greenhouses were just a little over twice as great as those measured in the control greenhouses. As for the consequences of this slightly more than doubling of the air's CO2 content, they report that "the average percentage of yield increases of all three sites were 270%, 257%, 87%, 140% and 227% for celery, leaf lettuce, stem lettuce, oily sowthistle, and Chinese cabbage, respectively."

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