The great nutrient collapse

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Retweeted by David Fahrenthold: https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold

Rising carbon dioxide is making many of our crops less nutritious. Why aren't we talking about it?

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The great nutrient collapse

The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.

By HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH 09/13/2017 05:03 AM EDT

Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.

Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?

Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.
....

In the outside world, the problem isn’t that plants are suddenly getting more light: It’s that for years, they’ve been getting more carbon dioxide. Plants rely on both light and carbon dioxide to grow. If shining more light results in faster-growing, less nutritious algae—junk-food algae whose ratio of sugar to nutrients was out of whack—then it seemed logical to assume that ramping up carbon dioxide might do the same. And it could also be playing out in plants all over the planet. What might that mean for the plants that people eat?

Helena Bottemiller Evich is a senior food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO Pro.

Authors:

Helena Bottemiller Evich [e-mail] @@hbottemiller

[rurallib]

1. Heard this on Thom Hartmann this afternoon

not at all surprising.
We are trying to move back as much as we can to organic and eating mostly veggies.

[GeoWilliam750]

2. Very interesting

[Binkie The Clown]

3. Why is nobody paying attention?

Because it doesn't boost ratings to report on it. Dancing with the Stars is just so much more important to the great unwashed masses of morons.

Yet another reason why the human race is blindly racing toward extinction. We just don't have what it takes as a species to survive in anything more complex than a simple hunter-gatherer band.

[pscot]

4. Excess carbon acts as a sink?