Plants may absorb more carbon dioxide than we originally thought, according to a new study. The study, led by Ying Sun, claims that climate change estimations have underestimated the amount of carbon dioxide that plants will counteract.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study found that carbon dioxide levels dropped along mesophyll diffusion pathways in plants. Previous climate change models did not account for the dissipation of carbon dioxide that occurred inside of plants. The authors of this new study estimated based on their findings that from 1901 to 2010, plants absorbed 16 percent more carbon dioxide than was originally thought.
"The atmospheric CO2 concentration only started to accelerate rapidly after 1950. So the 17% bias was achieved during a period of about 50 years. If we are going to predict future CO2 concentration increases for hundreds of years, how big would that bias be?" said Dr. Lianhong Gu, one of the lead authors of the paper.
However, climate change scientists do not think that this finding will make a difference to current climate change estimates. It does suggest that it is important to keep plants and vegetation strong, however.
Dr. Gu said that this finding showed how important it was to continue growing new plants and keeping the Earth "green" to minimize the effects of global warming as much as possible.
In addition to that, scientists reiterated that this finding does not change the need to make long-term cuts to carbon dioxide emissions to curb global warming.
"This new research implies it will be slightly easier to fulfill the target of keeping global warming below two degrees - but with a big emphasis on 'slightly'. Overall, the cuts in CO2 emissions over the next few decades will still have to be very large if we want to keep warming below two degrees," said Dr Chris Huntingford, a scientist who studies climate change.
It is very complicated trying to figure out what happens to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and how global warming affects different parts of the Earth. The WMO recently uncovered new evidence that the oceans are rapidly increasing temperature. About half of all carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere appears to go into the ocean.
