00:00We're covering two climate stories today, all things green.
00:04We'll talk about plants and trees.
00:06Brett, our first story from food manufacturing about the impacts of climate change and the
00:11nutritional quality of the foods we eat, specifically different types of crops.
00:15Yes, a study looked at leafy greens such as spinach and kale and wanted to see what the
00:22impact of higher CO2 and more extreme temperatures, higher temperatures had on those crops.
00:28What they found was, part of that was expected, Dan, higher plant growth, but the nutritional
00:35level decreased.
00:37And nutritional value, obviously a significant part of the food we eat.
00:40A lot of studies had looked at the crop yield.
00:42This one looked at the nutritional value, specifically for kale, arugula, and spinach, three types of
00:47vegetables.
00:48What types of details did they find about the nutrition of these crops?
00:53Yeah.
00:54When they applied extreme temperatures, what they saw was a decrease in key minerals such
00:59as calcium.
01:00Also, antioxidant levels were lowered.
01:03And when you combined increased CO2 with heat stress, they saw slower growth rates with
01:09that and also a decrease, once again, in nutrition.
01:12Yeah.
01:13Increased sugar is not a good thing.
01:14I think that was also found and that's definitely a potential impact on health that could increase
01:19the risk for type 2 diabetes potentially.
01:22So certainly a very interesting finding and a new way to look at food being impacted by
01:26climate change.
01:27Our second study today, this is from Boston University, this study looked at the impact
01:33of climate change and snowpack on how trees absorb carbon across New England.
01:37Yeah.
01:38So New England temperate forest here, typically, as we've been talking about, increased CO2 means
01:44plants will grow more and larger and faster.
01:48But they wanted to look at what is the impact of snowpack on these trees.
01:53And what they found was less snowpack during the winter has a significant impact on the growth
01:59of trees.
02:00And that's also going to affect how much carbon they take up.
02:03And so when there's less snowpack, you seem to get more freeze-thaw cycles and that actually
02:07slows the growth of the trees.
02:08How did they do this study to find out these results?
02:10Yeah.
02:11It's interesting.
02:12They used heated plots in a big chamber.
02:14They grew the trees.
02:15And so with the increased heat, Dan, the trees all grew faster than normal.
02:19But what they found was the trees that were insulated with snow and ice grew about 63% larger,
02:25faster versus 31% with no snow.
02:29Yeah, so if there's less snowpack in the future with climate change, there may be slower growth
02:34or there may not be as much growth of these trees that we had previously thought because
02:37we believe that warmer summers will allow for further growth.
02:40Yeah, and models may be overestimating the carbon uptake of these trees, especially in
02:44the Northeast.
02:45Yeah, so the overestimate is certainly an issue and something more to study in terms
02:48of how trees grow and how that growth impacts the amount of carbon they absorb.
02:52Thank you, Brett.
02:53For more stories about climate and other information, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.
02:59Yeah.
03:00That's pretty cool.
03:01Now, buddy, this one's trying to Pastor you get a little bit deeper because you would
03:02have more questions.
03:02Please feel free to struggle.
03:03Let me come back.
03:04Alright.
03:07Let's go back.
03:08Here we are a few.
03:12Keep both of us going back.
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