Is a Higher Amount of Carbon Dioxide Good for the World?

Global climate change is one of the most threatening problems of the modern world. It is a fact, and the leading cause is the increasing level of carbon dioxide concentration. Most scientists deeply believe in the impact of climate change-related global warming and how carbon dioxide contributes to increasing global warming. However, some scientists do not believe in such facts and deny global climate change. This is our investigation into this.

Social Media Posts

Social media posts became viral with the statement of Professor William Happer of Princeton University of US. In a conversation with Sky News, Professor William Happer stated that increasing carbon dioxide levels is good for the planet. He highlighted that higher levels of carbon dioxide improve plants’ photosynthesis process, increasing plant growth and making fruits and flowers larger.

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We decided to do a fact-check on this.

Fact Check

First, we checked who Professor William Happer was. Professor Happer is a well-known climate sceptic who has been campaigning against climate change-related matters. He has especially long preached that increasing carbon dioxide levels is good for the planet and not bad. Details about Professor William Happer can be found here and here.

His full interview with Sky News – Australia can be watched below.

William Happer is an accomplished physicist, but according to Dr Jason West,an associate professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, Happer has not published much research on climate change. More details can be read here. We also could not find such.

Is increasing carbon dioxide levels suitable for the planet, and how is carbon dioxide contributing to global warming related to global climate change? Let`s have a look at what science says about that.

You might hear that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases act like a blanket or a cap, trapping some of the heat that Earth might have otherwise radiated out into space. That’s the simple answer. But how exactly do specific molecules trap heat? The answer there requires navigating into physics and chemistry.

When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will go back into space if they are not disturbed.

Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere. That’s because molecules are picky about the range of wavelengths they interact with. For example, oxygen and nitrogen absorb energy with tightly packed wavelengths of around 200 nanometers or less, whereas infrared energy travels at broader and lazier wavelengths of 700 to 1,000,000 nanometers. Those ranges don’t overlap, so to oxygen and nitrogen, it’s as if the infrared waves don’t exist; they let the waves (and heat) pass freely through the atmosphere. So, infrared waves, which have relatively less energy than visible waves, are not absorbed by oxygen or nitrogen. However, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas molecules interact with infrared waves and absorb energy. After energy absorption and interaction, some of those infrared waves eventually go to the upper atmosphere and space, while some other waves are redirected towards the earth. Naturally, this redirection process helps maintain a proper temperature on Earth. Without them, the planet’s average temperature would be below freezing. So, one can logically think that even very low natural carbon dioxide levels and other greenhouse gases can significantly impact the  Earth’s climate. However, when greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere at alarming rates due to anthropogenic activities, they warm the planet and cause climate havoc. Details about this can be read here also

Today, CO2 levels are higher than in at least 3 million years. Although they still account for only 0.04% of the atmosphere, that still adds to billions upon billions of tons of heat-trapping gas. For example, in 2019 alone, humans dumped 36.44 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, which will linger for hundreds of years. So, plenty of CO2 molecules provide a heat-trapping blanket across the entire atmosphere. How global carbon dioxide emissions changed and gradually increased  from year to year can be referred to here

In the case of greenhouse gases, the planet’s temperature is a balance between how much energy comes in and how much energy goes out. Ultimately, any increase in heat-trapping means the Earth’s surface gets hotter.

Won’t the plants, ocean, and soil absorb all the excess CO2?

It will take a very long time—the natural carbon storage process has been happening for millions of years. However, when the natural carbon cycle is disturbed, it does not occur properly.

Plants, the oceans, and soil are natural carbon sinks — they absorb some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground, underwater, or in roots and tree trunks. Without human activity, the vast amounts of carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas deposits would have remained stored underground and mostly separated from the rest of the carbon cycle. But by burning these fossil fuels, humans are adding a lot more carbon into the atmosphere and ocean, and the carbon sinks don’t work fast enough to clean up our mess. More details can be read here.

Is Carbon Dioxide Good for the Plants ??

Plants indeed favour carbon dioxide. During photosynthesis, they take in carbon dioxide and, with the assistance of water and sunlight, make energy for themselves while releasing oxygen for us to breathe. Plants have been around for billions of years and have lived on Earth at times when the planet had far more CO2 in the air than it does now. So, would plants prefer a more carbon-heavy planet, like the one humans are now creating with our greenhouse gas emissions?

David Des Marais, an MIT Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering who studies how plants respond to their environments, says that plants do not necessarily like a planet with a high carbon dioxide percentage. According to Des Marais, most plants will grow faster and bigger with extra atmospheric CO2 if all other factors are equal. However, plant growth is too complex for a one-size-fits-all law, such as “more CO2 is better.”

Experiments in which scientists provided extra CO2 into plant-growing chambers have proven this basic science: the additional carbon makes plants grow faster if you maintain other factors, such as soil nutrients and water availability. Des Marais says things may not be so simple for the planet regarding the big picture. Additional experiments have tracked plants growing in free air carbon enrichment (FACE) sites, where the researchers added CO2 not to enclosed chambers but to open environments such as agricultural fields that more closely simulate reality. Although the added carbon sped up plant growth in these places, it did not accelerate nearly as quickly as for plants in closed, CO2-rich chambers.

Although plants need carbon dioxide to grow, their success in high-carbon environments is not guaranteed. Not all plants like extra carbon equally. And for those carbon aficionados in the plant kingdom, CO2 is not the only factor that controls growth. As any aspiring green thumb knows, plants need the proper water and soil nutrient balance to translate extra carbon dioxide into growth.

The NASA video below explains how various factors influence plants’ absorption of carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and how increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere do not often stimulate plant absorption.

This is a problem, given the way our climate is trending. Climate change, driven by excessive CO2 in the atmosphere, deepens droughts in places around the world. That reduces the water supply for plants there while simultaneously increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires, like what we saw in the news about the situation in California. In other places, plants will have to cope with more frequent disasters like flooding and heat stress, exposure to saltwater from rising seas, and increased pests that enjoy warmer winters. All those factors related to global warming impact the planet in unhealthy ways.

Let’s consider heavy carbon dioxide environments in the prehistoric ages, where different types of plants and animals lived, as per fossil evidence. That situation is unsuitable for humans or plants in our era.

Though planting millions of additional trees is one popular idea often floated to pull some CO2 out of the atmosphere, it is not clear that the world would have enough nutrients in the soil to allow for such growth. There are issues regarding the practicality of such things. More details can be read here.

Read also in Climate Fact Checks: Does rising CO2 benefit plants?

 Post misleadingly claims that CO2 is benefiting us by making Earth greener

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Conclusion

Our investigation found that the public is being misled by the statement that an increasing level of anthropogenic carbon dioxide is good for the planet. The rising level of carbon dioxide is connected with global warming, which causes global climate change, which is mostly  harmful to the earth, its ecosystems and all living beings. While it is true that a growing level of carbon dioxide can positively influence some plant types, it depends on various other factors, such as the mineral level of the soil, water availability, plant type, etc.