How does rising atmospheric CO2 affect marine organisms?

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Volume 5 Number 21:  22 May 2002

Temperature Record of the Week
This issue's Temperature Record of the week is from Owings, Maryland. Visit our U.S. Climate Data section to plot and view these data for yourself.

Current Editorial
Demise of Carbon Sequestration "Free Ride" Greatly Exaggerated: A new paper in Nature and a press release from Duke University predict the imminent end of the ability of the biosphere to sequester increasingly greater amounts of carbon as the air's CO2 content rises.  Both are dead wrong.

Subject Index Summaries
Agriculture (Species -- Potato): A summary of the recently published literature suggests that increases in the air's CO2 content will significantly enhance potato photosynthesis and tuber yield.

Holocene (Regional - Asia): The Holocene records from Asia that we have reviewed reveal a picture of millennial-scale oscillatory climatic behavior, the last three nodes of which are the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Modern Warm Period.  These records indicate there is nothing about our current climatic status, i.e., the Modern Warm Period, to indicate that it is any different from any other such period of warmth that has occurred during the current interglacial.

Current Journal Reviews
Malaria and Climate Change: Is global warming leading to increases in malaria in East African highlands?  Of course not.  What's more, it's not even warming there!

Great Basin Butterflies: Without even thinking about it, one inherently knows that climate alarmists predict catastrophic consequences for butterflies nearly everywhere, including the U.S. Great Basin, in the face of predicted global warming.  When one does think about it, however, as the authors of this important study did, some very different conclusions are reached.

Elevated CO2 Enhances Spring Growth in Strawberry Plants: And a very good job it does of it.

Effects of Elevated CO2 on Salt Tolerance in Tomato: High soil salinity reduces yield in most agricultural crops, including tomato.  However, as the CO2 concentration of atmosphere increases, tomato plants may be better able to tolerate this common plant stress.

Elevated CO2 Preferentially Stimulates Root Growth in Perennial Ryegrass Under FACE Field Conditions: Perennial ryegrass exhibited greater growth responses, especially belowground, to atmospheric CO2 enrichment under open-field conditions characteristic of the free-air CO2 enrichment experimental protocol than in enclosed environmental chambers.