US Study Revealed: CO2 Forecasts Perhaps Overestimated

According to the recent US study conducted by climate and earth scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, an ‘inherent structural deficiency’ has stopped present models from accounting for the slow ‘diffusion’ of atmospheric CO2 inside plant leaves.

The study’s researchers told that these models could underrate the involvement of rising CO2 to plant growth by as much as 16%.

These models need to be corrected to exactly forecast the implications of climate change, the researchers said.

As per the report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this morning, “Recent CO2 models underrate the long term receptiveness of the global terrestrial productivity to carbon dioxide fertilization. Understanding and accurately predicting how global terrestrial primary production responds to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations is a prerequisite for reliably assessing the long-term climate impact of anthropogenic fossil CO2 emissions.”

Green Umbrellas Keep a Lid on City Temperatures

The researchers stated in the study that, this 16% “correction” clearly demonstrate the constant overestimation of growth rates of historical atmospheric CO2 by earth system models. This paper will eventually direct to enhanced understanding and modelling of carbon–climate feedbacks.”

Another study published in the same journal showed that researchers artificially increased carbon dioxide levels in a US prairie grassland ecosystem for 8 years and the added carbon had increased the overall volume of the plants and promoted the ecosystem’s stability by reducing the growth of normally dominant plant species.

University of Texas study provided “great new insights into how the intricacies of leaf structure and function can have a planetary scale impact,” Pep Canadell, head of CSIRO’s Global Carbon Project stated.

He further told the Australian Science Media Centre, “The study provides a prospective clarification for why global earth system models cannot fully reproduce the observed atmospheric CO2 growth over the past 100 years.”

Furthermore, the study proposes that vegetation might be able to uptake more CO2 in the future than is presently modelled.”

The US study will eventually help us in order to explain why CO2 in the atmosphere was not rising faster. We already knew nature was working hard to hold CO2 concentrations in check, but this portrays how,” Peter Rayner of the University of Melbourne stated.