eli5: If plants and trees thrive on Carbon dioxide, and humans are producing more carbon dioxide, does that mean vegetation is benefiting from greenhouse gases? If not, how come?

Question

eli5: If plants and trees thrive on Carbon dioxide, and humans are producing more carbon dioxide, does that mean vegetation is benefiting from greenhouse gases? If not, how come?

In: 102

Answer 1

In the same way your body couldn’t really make of use of .1% more O2, plants aren’t optimized to make use of more CO2, at least not a meaningful way. They have evolved to use what they have, and no evolution mechanism has existed to have CO2 be a limiting factor.

The other side of this is just recognizing the sheer volume of CO2. Keep in mind that we measure CO2 in parts per million, which you can think of as 1% of 1% of 1%. So VERY small increases in CO2 have a MASSIVE impact on climate because even a very small percentage based in increase is trillions and trillions and trillions of more CO2 molecules.