[flavius29663]

This is a hilarious take. You're saying that plant food (CO2) is bad for plant based nutrition because they grow too fast and therefore plants have less minerals? How about we just improve nutrition for people that rely on cheap calories likes rice, corn and wheat...we should do that regardless. Those plants don't provide a proper nutrition anyway.

[whycombinetor]

I'm sure poor countries would love to turn their rice fields into soccer fields and feed themselves with more nutritious food, but they need to farm cheap calories to feed themselves with the amount of money they have.

[flavius29663]

and how does more CO2 make this worse? Say a country like Sri Lanka has 1 million tons of rice per year - that contain 100 tons of minerals. After the CO2 enrichment they get 1.2million tons of rice, but with they contain still 100 tons of minerals.

Things Sri Lanka can do:

1. eat more rice, all 1.2 mil tons of it, for the same amount of minerals (this would lead to obesity).

2. plant and eat 1 million tons of rice per year, leaving empty 1/6 of the previous fields free for other use. In those 1/6 of the fields, they can now grow carrots and mushrooms and lentils and other highly nutritious stuff. It might even leave them with extra land for football fields.

How is this an issue? I swear: sometimes people want to find a negative even in the most positive outcomes.

[whycombinetor]

Sri Lanka is an interesting example as their organic fertilizer mandate would (I imagine, being less nutrient dense) fail to provide enough nutrients to support the increased growth of the plants in the new higher-CO2 atmosphere. The synthetic fertilizer ban situation also doesn't seem to indicate that they would be adept at implementing large scale agricultural changes without throwing the whole system into disarray.

Don't forget to factor in the cognitive impairment from higher CO2 as well - even if CO2 magically made the food both more nutrient-dense and with higher growth rate (instead of higher growth rate with lower nutrient-density) the overall health effect on humans would still be presumably a massive net negative due to the cognitive function decline.

[flavius29663]

> even if CO2 magically made the food both more nutrient-dense and with higher growth rate

I just detailed on how that will happen, no need to use magic. Increased CO2 will be better for plants worldwide (including deserts) and for agriculture, that's maybe the one positive thing I can find about global warming.

[whycombinetor]

What, you and I are typing right now in a comment thread precisely about increased CO2 resulting in lower nutrient density, so no, you haven't detailed how that will happen.

[flavius29663]

you need to use less land for the same amount of poor calories (rice,corn,wheat,potatoes), and use the remaining land for highly nutritional food