Abstract
On a geological timescale, the carbon dioxide concentration in the global atmosphere was, over the few millennia before industrialisation, about as low as it has ever been. It has probably been within that low range of 200 to 300 ppmv throughout the 2 million years of human evolution. To understand the role of vegetation in modulating recent anthropogenic global atmospheric change, examination of the reasons for the low pre-industrial CO2 concentration is instructive.
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Gifford, R.M. (1993). Implications of CO2 Effects on Vegetation for the Global Carbon Budget. In: Heimann, M. (eds) The Global Carbon Cycle. NATO ASI Series, vol 15. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84608-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84608-3_7
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