For decades, alarmists have predicted a future of mass starvation, hunger, and disease due to scarcity of commodities, energy and food. In the early 1970s, a professor named Paul Ehrlich authored a bestselling book entitled “The Population Bomb,” forecasting such dire predictions due to increases in global population. More recently, government officials and professors have claimed that manmade global warming—driven by increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—will lead to large-scale crop failures and mass starvation.
But worldwide agricultural output continues to rise faster than population growth. Today’s humans are surrounded by food abundance in ways that the humans of yesteryear were not. There have been 50 years of growth in world outputs of most food grains, according to the USDA.
How can this be? Some research suggests that increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is helping spur plant growth rather than harming plant growth. Dr. Randall Donohue, a scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian science agency, has found that elevated CO2 levels enable leaf photosynthesis because plants are better able to convert sunlight into sugar using less water.
Dr. Donohue notes that growing worldwide leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas.
