A defense of CO 2
Farm and Ranch December 19, 2011 Carbon dioxide, CO 2, gets a bad rap and so does agriculture. That’s what Art Douglas, Professor Emeritus of Climate Sciences at Creighton University, recently told a northwest grain convention. Human caused CO 2 gets the blame for climate change and global warming. Douglas; “If you had a totally pristine world, in other words with old grasslands and trees, versus one in which we have a lot of agriculture and we are producing crops every year, which one of those environments is going to take more CO 2 out of the atmosphere?…..The crops.” In fact, plants may not be getting enough CO 2. Douglas: “They have done lots of studies on corn and corn is believed to be CO 2 starved. And they have done a lot of studies in Iowa in which they put the plants inside a tent and they doubled the CO 2, and they quadrupled the CO 2. And guess what? It does far better when its quadrupled.” Douglas said humans are blamed for increasing the percentage of CO 2 in the atmosphere from point-028 percent to point-038%. He said the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been 20 times higher than that in the course of the earth’s history and has gone up and down before the time of humans. Tomorrow, Douglas on factors he says outweigh CO 2’s impact on climate. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Ag Info Net. ?
