Rising CO2 Doesn’t Starve Crops of Nutrients: Now Here’s the Real Science

The latest example of this comes from the Washington Post, where a recent piece bemoaned the effect CO2 has on the nutritional values of plant crops. There's just one problem with their assertions: They're bollocks. The Heartland Institute's Anthony Watts has more.

The Washington Post (WaPo) claims in “The invisible force making food less nutritious” that rising carbon dioxide pollution is steadily degrading the nutritional quality of crops, putting billions at risk of hidden hunger. This is false. The article amplifies small projected changes in the vitamins and minerals in food based on modeling exercises while downplaying the massive gains in global food production, nutrition access, and agricultural resilience made possible in part by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).

The WaPo frames carbon dioxide as “the invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon,” arguing that “surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere” are depleting essential nutrients like zinc. That framing ignores a fundamental biological reality: plants are built from carbon. Carbon dioxide is not pollution to plants, rather it is the raw material of photosynthesis.

In other words, CO2 is essential for plant growth, and at the moment, CO2 levels are actually on the low side, compared to the last 500 million years of history, which is about how long there have been terrestrial plants on Earth. In fact, CO2 is often added to greenhouses to supercharge the growth of plants therein. CO2 is plant food, and as such, it is the very foundation of the entire planet's ecology.

Mr. Watts continues:

The central claim rests on a meta-analysis suggesting average nutrient declines of roughly 3.2 percent across crops since the late 1980s. That is a small change, nearly within the noise of agricultural variability. Soil composition, fertilizer use, irrigation, crop variety selection, harvest timing, and post-harvest storage all influence nutrient content. A few percentage points over decades is not a nutritional apocalypse and won’t result in hunger or even malnutrition.

Meanwhile, global food production has soared. Grain yields per acre have increased dramatically since the 1960s. See the graph below:

Here's that graph:

Crop yields since 1960. pic.twitter.com/z5Mbxupiwi

— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) May 7, 2026

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), in its "Summary for Policymakers," points out some more of these inconvenient truths:

• Atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a non-toxic, non-irritating, and natural component of the atmosphere. Long-term CO2 enrichment studies confirm the findings of shorter-term experiments, demonstrating numerous growth-enhancing, water-conserving, and stress-alleviating effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 on plants growing in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. 
• The ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content is causing a great greening of the Earth. All across the planet, the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration has stimulated vegetative productivity. This observed stimulation, or greening of the Earth, has occurred in spite of many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation, including fires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic change. 
• There is little or no risk of increasing food insecurity due to global warming or rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Farmers and others who depend on rural livelihoods for income are benefitting from rising agricultural productivity throughout the world, including in parts of Asia and Africa where the need for increased food supplies is most critical. Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels play a key role in the realization of such benefits. 

In short: Crop yields are increasing, in part due to a modest increase in CO2 levels, and that's a good thing. The Earth's climate, yes, is in a warming cycle. It has been, with some peaks and dips, since the end of the last major glaciation. And a slightly warmer planet is better for humans and for our plant crops than a slightly cooler planet; see the Little Ice Age, when crop failures led to widespread famines.

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What this Washington Post piece has done is to take one minor data point and blow it up into a condemnation of human activity, and, predictably, it gets it wrong.

Carbon dioxide is not a toxin to crops. It is a growth substrate. Demonizing it as the “invisible force” behind nutritional decline ignores the broader picture of agricultural abundance and human adaptation.

The Washington Post has taken a modest statistical decline in select minerals and inflated it into a planetary health crisis. That is not balanced reporting. Their readers deserve better.

This is how it happens every time. The climate scolds, the political left, and the legacy media (but I repeat myself threefold) aren't interested in scrupulous analysis of facts. To some extent, that's understandable; sensationalism sells papers, after all, and they have their audience to cater to, as often as not, feather-headed types, not interested in facts or analysis but rather in maintaining that perpetual sense of outrage in which the modern left seems to continually dwell. They are looking for quick gotchas, and most of all, they are looking for reasons to control the rest of us. 

Facts don't matter to these people. Sound bites do. That explains why we keep seeing things like this, the latest round of horse squeeze from the WaPo.