What about all the people who say the world will be greener and therefore there will be more plants and food? It's almost like they just made that up to suit their worldview?
The world will become unevenly greener. Population density and recent population rise is inversely correlated with places that will get greener.
Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.
Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.
The greening is uneven. Canada/Siberia are getting warmer so plants have longer growing seasons there. But it's getting browner in other areas because of increased drought and heat. Overall the predictions are for lower global food production on net.
The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.
You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:
| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.
> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food
That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:
| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature
| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely
| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others
Its exactly the opposite. Plants grow larger with higher CO2. And they also reduce in digestive quality significantly as more of the material is lignin.
> At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
> There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
There’s low confidence in the magnitude of this effect in that report.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
That is a very long chain of dependencies (what is a dependency, what is not can be shown differently than below), meaning there are less and less likely to be many people following the entire chain of dependencies. This is sometimes a key part of how a straw man is constructed.
Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.
Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.