Aug 20, 2010 10:12 GMT  ·  By

According to experts, it would appear that the average size of plants tends to decrease in recent years, when compared to the mean sizes they had in past decades. The researchers believe that this effect may be attributed to global warming.

The worldwide phenomenon is taking place as pollution produced by humans spews out vast amounts of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere, which trap heat on our planet.

This means that heat from the Sun or other source, which would otherwise have been lost to space, gets trapped in the atmosphere, producing the infamous greenhouse effect.

Apparently, global warming is capable of promoting a number of unusual events, and also of increasing or decreasing the frequency at which natural phenomenon takes place.

Floods and droughts are a good example of this. Extreme atmospheric events, such as unexpected storms in areas that are generally spared from the wrath of the elements, are also believed to be caused by climate change.

Because the weather is changing, precipitation patterns do to. This has a number of direct effects on the ground, and the most common one is the drought. Because of it, experts say, plants have been gradually growing smaller for years.

The data needed for this investigation was collected from around the world, using satellites operated by NASA. These spacecrafts can measure global plant productivity over the last 10 years.

The 1 percent decrease may seem insignificant at first, but experts say that the changes could have nefarious impacts on food security, biofuel production, and also on Earth's global carbon cycle.

“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” explains Steven Running.

He is a professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, and was involved as a researcher in the new investigation. The datasets he and his group used span between 2000 and 2009, OurAmazingPlanet reports.

“This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth,” Running says, referring to the fact that climate change is also having some positive effects on plants.

He explains that, as general temperature levels shift, plant growing seasons become longer, which means that the vegetation can grow to larger sizes. But apparently excessive drought can counteract this effect entirely.

“The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production,” says Maosheng Zhao,who is also based at the university.