A team of scientists in the United States claim that the climate models used to anticipate the increase of CO2 concentrations in the air are about 17 percent higher because of incorrectly approximating the amount of the greenhouse gas plants use for photosynthesis.

The researchers showed how they investigated the capability of plants to absorb increased amounts of carbon dioxide and found that they are able to extract more of the gas than previously thought.

Like Us on Facebook

Plants are known to take in CO2 and sunlight to produce glucose, with oxygen as a by-product. What was not really clear is how plants generally react to the increased concentrations of CO2 in the air. Studies conducted in the past suggest that some plants grow bigger due to the increased supply of carbon dioxide, which in turn, makes them require more carbon dioxide.

Recently, it has come into light that normal climate models have, on average, been slightly wrong in anticipating how much CO2 is being released into the air by man-made processes. The error rate of the predictions have, on average, been 17 percent too high, and researchers are scrambling to figure out why.

The team took a new look at the process of photosynthesis and how it might be changed when exposed to increasingly higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the air. They found out that when the levels of CO2 rose, plants changed the method in which they processed the gas, keeping more of it to be used as a fertilizer, which let the plants become more robust or grow bigger. Bigger and stronger trees, in turn, would require more of the greenhouse gas to be able to satisfy its needs.

The researchers also noted that when the plants were exposed to the same higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which happened over the past century, they were able to extract around 16 percent more CO2 on the average, which almost lines up with the error difference between the actual amounts of carbon dioxide and the levels predicted by climate models.

TagsCO2, carbon dioxide, Greenhouse gasses, Plants, Photosynthesis, trees, Rainforest, forest