Besides inspiring conspiracy theories concerning scientists, another problem of CO2? Inadvertent carbohydrate loading, according to Politico‘s profile of Irakli Loladz, a mathematician assisting biologists puzzling over why adding algae to zooplankton’s food source was killing them, rather than causing them to grow more:
Not as nutritious as it once was?
The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.Loladze used his math training to help measure and explain the algae-zooplankton dynamic. He and his colleagues devised a model that captured the relationship between a food source and a grazer that depends on the food. They published that first paper in 2000. But Loladze was also captivated by a much larger question raised by the experiment: Just how far this problem might extend. …In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?
Maybe it’s a negative feedback loop – starve the critters causing the planet’s atmosphere to go out of balance. Keeping in mind that “fat” doesn’t mean they have too many nutrients, only that their intake of certain substances is out of balance for the organism.
Carbohydrates have an empirical formula of Cm(H2O)n (where m could be different from n), so keeping in mind the rise of CO2 in the air, and being a simple software engineer just freehand speculating here, this shouldn’t actually be that big a surprise – an increase in the density of atmospheric CO2 should displace other atoms in an organism that processes for CO2, once the CO2 is decomposed. Assuming plants break down CO2 for the constituent atoms / molecules. Anyone know if I’m just blathering here?
The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect [Loladze] had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
It also shoots holes in the argument that higher CO2 concentrations will benefit us through better plant production, as they point out. It’s a good article – go and read it. Even bees are affected:
Sugar crash city?
[Lewis] Ziska devised an experiment that eliminated the complicating factor of plant breeding: He decided to look at bee food.
Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time.
They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors.
That gets a wow out of me. If you’re interested, here’s an academic report by Ziska, et al, as published in the Royal Society Proceedings B.
I wonder if we can blame the fall in human sperm counts on this as well. Scientific American reports:
Sperm counts in men from America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have dropped by more than 50 percent in less than 40 years, researchers said on Tuesday.
They also said the rate of decline is not slowing. Both findings — in a meta-analysis bringing together various studies — pointed to a potential decline in male health and fertility.
“This study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp ongoing drop in sperm count,” said Hagai Levine, who co-led the work at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem.
No definitive cause is known, although various factors get generous helpings of blame. But consider, for those of us who believe the evidence of observations leads to the inevitable conclusion that biological evolution is a real-world process, we then must conclude that organisms, and the processes which they utilize, are always evolving, slowly, towards some optimal state in relation to their environment. For a couple of million years our forebears evolved in an environment in which CO2 concentrations were much lower and relatively stable. Now they’re changing rather rapidly, as measured at Mauna Loa and other data collection locations, and given the likely pace at which species change and adapt, I doubt our current operating environment is much like the one we evolved to fit. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that this mismatch is causing our bodies to misfire.
This entire apparent revelation depresses me, convincing me once again that the human population on this planet is driving the ecology that it depends on towards the edge of stability, and once it’s over that edge, the human population level will be at risk of being forcibly lowered – by Nature and by War. We’re over-populated.
Our current population is in the neighborhood of 7.5 billions (short scale – 109). My estimate, based on nothing but gut feeling, is that a human world wide population of 500 millions would assure long term survival for the species, in a tolerable civilization, in combination with long term ecological stability, all other variables held constant.
That’s so easy to write, but so hard to consider. 7 billions dead would be a horrible tragedy that would paralyze a generation, but I fear it’s either that or 7.5 billions dead, with scattered survivors faced with some awful plague that will keep people from banding together, or radiation from a war contaminating most of the surface and unbalancing the world-wide ecology.
Or worse.
