| By Bob Weaver
In the course of a 17-year experiment on more than 1 million plants, US scientists put future global warming to a real world test â growing California flowers and grasslands with extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to mimic a climate changing world.
The study appears to confirm the slow, devastating effects that
man-made carbon emissions are having on planet earth.
US citizens are politically divided over climate change being a hoax created by more that 1,000 world-wide climate scientists, essentially saying if it is happening, it is a cyclical event, not connected to human consumption and its pollution.
The California results, simulating a post-2050 world, aren't pretty.
The results contradict those who insist that because plants like carbon dioxide â the main heat-trapping gas spewed by the burning of fossil fuels â climate change isn't so bad, and will result in a greener Earth.
In the 17 year California time machine created ecosystem, the plants that received extra carbon dioxide, as well as those that got extra warmth, didn't grow more or get greener. They also didn't remove the pollution and store more of it in the soil.
Plant growth tended to decline with rising temperatures.
The experiment really puts to bed the idea of a greener hypothesis where ecosystems save us from the implications of human-induced climate change.
"This study clearly demonstrates that as temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, grassland ecosystems will likely not be able to tolerate the higher temperatures and increased drought stress," said Boston University biologist Richard Primack.
The warming is greater over land, and greater still in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica.
The warming numbers may sound low, but as an average over the surface of an entire planet, it is actually high, which explains why much of the world's land ice is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace.
Most noticeable are increased erratic weather patterns around the world.
Scientists believe most and probably all of the warming since 1950 was caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. If emissions continue unchecked, they say the global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet and undermine its capacity to support a large human population.
Now it seems that such science is in the hands of multi-national
carbon emission producers and their political allies.
In simple words, it is "follow the money."
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