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

There’s a lot of bad answers in this thread. The short answer is yes. The direct effect of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increased plant growth. Now, that’s not true 100% of the time. Plant growth can be limited by other factors- water availability, other macronutrients, etc.

The other big however is the secondary effects of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Warming beyond a certain point could be quite bad for plant growth. One big thing is it increases evapotranspiration, which can dry plants out and inhibit their growth.

Modeling all these effects out is of course complicated. The most likely outcome is that the optimal CO2 level for plant growth was somewhere between the pre-industrialization baseline, 280 ppm, and our current concentration of 420 PPM.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/