It turns out that plants may actually cause increases in extreme heat. Scientists have found that heatwaves from Europe to China may be more intense due to the way plants on the ground respond to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In this latest study, the researchers examined data from 314 different plant species across 56 different field sites. In particular, they focused on the plants' stomata, which are small pores in leaves that take in carbon dioxide and lose water to the atmosphere.
"We often underestimate the role of vegetation in extreme temperature events as it has not been included in enough detail in climate models up until this point," Jatin Kala, lead author of the new study, said. "These more detailed results are confronting but they help explain why many climate models have consistently underestimated the increase in the intensity of heatwaves at the rise in maximum temperatures when compared to observations."
When plants release less water to the atmosphere, they can cause more warming. This, in turn, can cause an increase in heat wave intensity.
"These world-first results will have significant impact on the development of climate models around the world," Andy Pitman, one of the researchers, said. "However, it is bringing together of observations by ecologists, theory from biologists, physics from land surface modelers and climate science in the global modeling, that is revolutionary."
The findings showed that when plants are exposed to more carbon dioxide, they lose less water to the atmosphere. This, in turn, causes more warming to occur. In fact, researchers have now estimated that there could be an increase in maximum temperatures of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius in Europe and China during heatwaves.
Of course, these findings aren't the whole picture. Studies have shown that the change in climate from plants may not nearly be as bad as expected. Studies have suggested that all plant life has the same internal temperature controls and that plants may not feed back into global warming quite as much as thought.
With that said, plants will contribute somewhat, and these new findings show exactly by how much.
The findings are published in the March 2016 journal Scientific Reports.
