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?
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The thing to wrap your head around is that “nature” isn’t just one thing. Even if some plants can take advantage of some of the aspects of climate change, the ecosystems of the world are not made of just those plants, and even they may rely on other organisms that could go extinct through climate change. And then you can get something called a “trophic cascade” which is really bad.
The best example is the classic one of Yellowstone wolves and deer. When the wolves of Yellowstone got hunted to near extinction, it was “positive” for the deer. There were fewer predators, and so more deer could exist. Except, the “good” thing for the deer meant that there were more deer, and the same amount of plants for the deer to eat. So the grasses in the park got destroyed, and the deer moved to other places, places originally inhabited by other animals, and they ate all the grass there too. Eventually there’s no grass left for anything else, the river causes excess erosion and flooding on this now barren land, and even the deer start dying due to sickness and starvation because they were overpopulated.
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