Why isn’t increased CO2-levels positive for nature?

Question

The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing and have done so for many years. Shouldn’t this have a positive impact on plants etc.?

Maybe not nature including humans, but plants should thrive, right?

In: 2

Answer 1

Many reasons

1. Nature is pretty delicate, changing any one variable on a global scale by a small percent will have ripple effects all over the place.
2. CO2 creates the greenhouse effect, i.e. heats up the planet
3. Clarification, when people talk about “X Tons of CO2”, they almost *always* mean “Equivalent to X Tons of CO2”. There are dozens of common carbon-based emissions, many which are far worse than an actual CO2 of similar mass. There are estimates about how much worse each is, and then they do a conversion. So if methane is 10X worse than CO2, and a ton of methane is released, you’ll here “10 tons of carbon emissions”