How does rising atmospheric CO2 affect marine organisms?

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Volume 5 Number 25:  19 June 2002

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

Current Editorial
The Aerial Fertilization Effect of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment: Can We Make a Good Thing Even Better?: Humanity owes a huge debt of gratitude to the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration that accompanied the planet's recovery from the last great ice age, as the CO2 increase single-handedly doubled the productivity of earth's plants.  The biosphere's rejuvenation is not yet finished, however; for we stand today on the verge of even further productivity increases, due to the continuing upward trend in the air's CO2 content and the possibility of creating novel plant genotypes better adapted to take advantage of this most fortunate phenomenon.

Subject Index Summaries
Agriculture (Species -- Cotton): Nearly all agricultural plants respond to increases in the air's CO2 content by displaying enhanced rates of photosynthesis and biomass production.  In this brief summary, we review the results of some recent atmospheric CO2 enrichment studies of cotton, to see if this important fiber crop fits this tradition.

Floods (Europe): Climate alarmists are always claiming we will see more and larger floods in a warmer world.  We here review some papers describing relevant studies in Europe to see if this claim has any merit.

Current Journal Reviews
Wind-Blown Sand on the Coast of France: During the coldest parts of the past 4000 years, strong and frequent wind storms created significant dune fields in France and many other European countries, while at the same time negatively impacting the people living there in a number of other ways.

SeaWiFS: Assessing the Climatic Significance of Aerosols: Out over the world's oceans, where aerosols are much better detected against the water's low-reflectivity surface, their radiative cooling influence is determined to be far larger than the radiative warming influence of all the CO2 that has accumulated in the atmosphere since the inception of the Industrial Revolution.

Effects of Elevated CO2 and Ozone on Spring Wheat: A Literature Survey: A review of 13 different experiments performed on a single spring wheat cultivar exposed to elevated atmospheric concentrations of both CO2 and O3 revealed that...

Elevated CO2 and Stomatal Functioning in Grassland Species: Has the historic rise in the air's CO2 content from pre-industrial to current levels impacted stomatal functioning in grassland plants?

Influence of Elevated CO2 Concentrations on Oak Isoprene Emissions: Isoprene plays an important role in atmospheric processes that lead to the formation of ozone and various organic acids.  In this paper, the authors report the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations on foliar isoprene emissions from a species of scrub oak.