Increasing CO2 in our abmosphere can starve us

It's pretty much indisputable that the burning of carbon based fossil fuels over the course of the last couple hundred years has pumped up our CO2 levels in the atmosphere. This is clearly illustrated by this long term data set that has been taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

It's also pretty scary that an ocean CO2 level of 350ppm will drive down the pH with the resulting acidity sufficient to dissolve the calcium carbonate coral reefs around the world.

And, it's pretty scary that all of this CO2 in the atmosphere is insulating us and raising the global temperature.


But what really scares the tar out of me is this recent report from the journal Science. In a nutshell, contrary to what one might think, increasing CO2 is not good for plants. You might think it is since they use CO2 for photosynthisis, right? Wrong! Too much CO2 causes plants to not be able to use nitrogen and they become stunted, but as much as 20% with a doubling of CO2.. Not only that but plants that get less nitrogen are less nutritious.



Okay, folks, this is a no-brainer. The world population is going off the chart and we need to feed these people! These are our children and grandchildren I'm talking about! Our wanton burning of fossil fuel will essentially reduce the amount of nutritious food available to us in the future. We must develop alternative fuels, including solar, wind, and my favorite, algae.

I like algae because algae removes carbon and other pollutants from our waterways, and then if the technology pans out, this algae can be converted into fuel. I should also say that I'm biased since I'm working on a project that hopes to do just that, turn pollution into fuel.

I'm working on the Chesapeake Algal Project ChAP at VIMS.

There's a lot of bad news out there, but I think that if technologies like ours and others get going, we may have better news in the future.