Carbon Dioxide is the powerhouse of our food supply
CO₂ is the unsung hero of life on Earth, powering the entire food web through photosynthesis and playing a foundational role from the planet’s earliest days.
This is its deep, wonder-filled contribution to the creation of free oxygen and rise of life. Without CO₂ Earth would most likely still be a lifeless world with a toxic atmosphere and lifeless oceans loaded with dissolved iron.
CO₂ is a miracle molecule that turns sunlight into food, oxygen into breath and a rocky planet into today’s blue-green paradise: CO₂ + water + sunlight = sugar energy + oxygen. Through photosynthesis, it has since transformed the whole world.
The rise of DNA and all multicellular organisms like animals, all trace back to CO₂’s astonishing role in building the carbon backbone of life. One thing is certain, without CO₂ there would be no photosynthesis, no oxygen, no food chains and no us.
The early cyanobacterial organisms floating in huge mats in the primordial oceans, released so much oxygen that it triggered the Great Oxidation Event. As oxygen permeated the oceans it began reacting with dissolved iron in the oceans, forming the vast banded iron formations, which are now the source of most of the world’s iron ore reserves and current steel production.
Photosynthesis was embedded as chloroplasts within all plants, algae and phytoplankton, through a crucial evolutionary event called endosymbiosis. Larger eukaryotic cells engulfed the free-living cyanobacteria; it was a mutually beneficial and permanent, symbiotic relationship. Since then all plants, algae and phytoplankton create glucose energy from sunlight, water and nutrients in the soil—energy that now fuels everything on Earth from bacteria to blue whales.
So the next time you eat a salad, bite into fruit or just breathe in—thank CO₂. Because it’s not the villain, it’s the unsung architect of life.
Another amazing benefit: NASA satellite data reveals the Earth has greened by 25 to 50% since the 1980s—with more forests, crops and vegetation—thanks to rising CO₂. Plants grow faster, bigger and use water more efficiently.
The greening magic of photosynthesis continues today and is known as the CO₂ ‘fertilization effect’. Much of the world has now agonised for four decades over 1.1 to 1.4 degrees of warming since the frozen centuries of the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850). Isn’t this the classic double-edged sword?
CO₂ greens our world like a celestial gardener; yet we are unable to say thank you.
source x.com/PeterDClack
Terry Shipman
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Most people of my generation learned about photosynthesis in elementary school in the 1950s so this comes as no surprise to us. We also studied history and learned about how people in previous centuries struggled against the cold. As a result I am more fearful about cold rather than heat. A brutal cold wave is forecast to sweep across Arkansas by tomorrow morning. I have natural gas wall-mounted space heaters that don’t use electricity so I’ll stay warm in the event the incoming ice and snow takes out my power.
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Joseph Olson
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“Four Known Ways Carbon Dioxide Cools the Planet” by Dr Pierre Latour, PE at Principia-scientific includes the chemical reactions in photosynthesis. Plants produce the sugars, starches and cellulose necessary for all life forms and there is a direct linear relationship between CO2 concentration and rate of photosynthesis up to 1600 ppm. Double CO2 and you double plant growth.
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crackpot
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The planet warms by some real cause, making it more hospitable to life, then CO2 dissolved in the oceans is released to the atmosphere, feeding the plants which feed the growing world.
Sounds like the plan of our loving God. No wonder lazy, unproductive “scientists” want to hide what He gives us in the ground “out of fear,” even blot out His light.
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