Higher CO2, More Global Warming, and Less Extinction? SEPTEMBER
01, 2004 by CHRISTOPHER LINGLE Christopher Lingle is a professor
of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and
adjunct scholar at the Centre for Civil Society in New Delhi. It
is widely believed that humans exert a harmful impact on the
natural environment, especially when it comes to releasing
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And so there is some alarm
that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has
risen by 25–30 percent in the last 200 years. One viewpoint has
become known as the “CO2-induced global warming extinction
hypothesis,” which projects greater extinction of species. The
combination of global warming and an increase in atmospheric CO2
will supposedly cause plants and animals that cannot escape the
stress from rising temperatures to become extinct. In January a
study published in the journal Nature projected that 15–37
percent of species will become extinct by the middle of the
century at current r