Far from turning the Earth into a baking lifeless hell as had been thought, elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are causing the deserts of the world to bloom with new green foliage, government scientists in Australia have found.
Yes, this comes from government scientists
Scanning the planet’s formerly dry and lifeless regions using satellite imagery, scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), discovered that increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years.
“We found a strong link between the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and a greening that’s been observed across many of the world’s arid environments,” explains Dr Randall Donohue of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.
According to Donohue and his colleagues, climbing levels of CO2 in the air correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982 to 2010 across arid areas in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.
Called CO2 fertilization, elevated levels of CO2 enable a leaf during photosynthesis – the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar – to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
I’m thinking that this should be GOOD news. How about you?
See entire article by Lewis Page:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50563/abstract
CSIRO article:
http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2.aspx
Thanks to Carl B for these links