Eventually I’m going to get in trouble for blogging things that are two weeks old, but that’s what happens when you’re busy. In truth, I only found this article a couple days ago, though it’s another week and a half older than that:

A small but growing body of research is finding that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, while increasing crop yield, decrease the nutritional value of plants. More than a hundred studies, for example, have found that when CO2 from fossil-fuel burning builds up in plant tissues, nitrogen (essential for making protein) declines. A smaller number of studies hint at another troubling impact: As atmospheric CO2 levels go up, trace elements in plants (such as zinc and iron, which are vital to animal and human life) go down, potentially malnourishing all those that subsist on the plants.

At first I thought of the results I’ve seen from FACE experiments, but those results only address levels of nutrients that crops need to survive. As CO₂ levels increase, so too does plant growth until another nutrient becomes limiting, a role often taken by nitrogen. This leads to plants with low levels of nitrogen and other nutrients, which to summarize the more in-depth coverage of the Grist piece, is not so good.

The really important part, to my mind, is the fact that this turns the pro-warming stance of groups like the Greening Earth Society completely on its head. The fact aside that the FACE experiments don’t support the idea of a post-climate-change agricultural boom and the formation of a new Eden, this new research suggests that even the food that we will be able to produce in a carbon-rich atmosphere is likely to be less nutritious for us, as well as for the rest of the biosphere on which we depend.

How many different ways can climate change be cast as a human health issue rather than “just” an environmental one?