High CO2 Levels Can Reduce Plant Growth

Makarand writes "This article in the Stanford Report has the first released findings of the Jasper Ridge Global Change Project - a multi-year experiment, conducted at Stanford University, designed to study ecosystem response to environments that might exist 100 years from now. The currently held belief that our car and factory emissions may help grow some crops and trees faster and bigger (atleast in the short term) by emitting carbon dioxide, a plant nutrient, is being questioned by this study. They found that elevated levels of carbon dioxide when combined with other consequences of climate change - higher temperatures, increased precipitation etc, reduced plant growth. This means that increased carbon dioxide levels combined with other climate change factors might eventually limit the capacity of natural ecosystems to transfer carbon in the atmosphere to plants and soil. Instead of isolating one climate change factor and studying its effects on the ecosystem, the Stanford team included four climate change factors over several generations of plants to come to their conclusions."