Hacker News Reader

“Julie Wolf at the US Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland, and her colleagues conjectured that surging carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere could have contributed to the weed’s success by providing building blocks for the plant to ramp up its parthenin production.”

View on HN

Only if you leave out the paragraph directly afterwards, where they tested it experimentally:

> The researchers grew two types of famine weed, one invasive and the other non-invasive, and exposed them to the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide recorded in 1950 and 2020. In the invasive variety, parthenin concentrations peaked at the highest carbon levels. The results suggest that modern levels of carbon dioxide have contributed to the noxious weed’s toxicity.

Thanks for pointing that out; I stopped reading at that point. They kind of buried the lede.

I think reading the article always helps.

> The researchers grew two types of famine weed, one invasive and the other non-invasive, and exposed them to the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide recorded in 1950 and 2020. In the invasive variety, parthenin concentrations peaked at the highest carbon levels

Reply on news.ycombinator.com