Bad news for vegetarians. Even the food grown will suffer the negative consequences of climate change: wheat, rice, barley and potatoes are less nutritious. Because of global warming crops - to which the lives of billions of people - will give products with a lower protein intake. At least that suggest more than 40 scientific studies that have focused their attention on how the increase in carbon dioxide the atmosphere can alter the nutritional properties of wheat, rice and barley, according to a report in New Scientist.
crops, so far there has been limited to calculating the collateral damage related to the greenhouse effect: cyclones, storms and droughts. How can we forget the last flood in Bangladesh which has left some 4,000 dead and 20 million displaced? Losing a collection of a whole nation is very serious indeed. But even worse would be the depletion of protein in many plant needed by man.
To evaluate the quantity protein lost from the plants with the increase of carbon dioxide in the air were researchers at Southwestern University in Georgetown (Texas), led by Daniel Taub. To obtain reliable data, the team sprayed the plants grown in open fields, with the gas in various concentrations. And the results are not exactly comforting. For wheat, barley, rice and potatoes treated with carbon dioxide levels recorded protein decreased by 15% for high concentrations of CO2.
According to Taub, this occurs because incorporating more carbon, plants are stimulated to produce proteins at the expense of carbohydrates. The consequences such a change would damage the relatively developed populations, who are used to recruit proteins with the meat. On the other hand, would create a serious problem in many populations, less developed, which base their diet on the products of the earth. For example, in Bangladesh, 80% of the protein that people assume comes from the story.
study these drastic changes occur for carbon dioxide concentrations higher than those currently present in our atmosphere. Concentrations Taub hopes to never reach. Otherwise, the problem would be resolved by increasing levels of nitrogen in the soil. Arnold Bloom, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, In fact, the nitrogen helps the plants to produce proteins. It must be said, however, that not all scientists are so pessimistic: the link between climate and vegetation gave variable results in fact, not certain.
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