A recent study compared past climate change models and found something startling: previously predicted carbon dioxide levels for the present day were wrong. In fact, the research showed that predictions aimed at today overshot real carbon dioxide levels by an average of 17 percent.

The new goal became to find out why, and the working theory is that these models were based on incorrect assumptions of how much carbon dioxide plants use for photosynthesis.

It has long been known that plants take in carbon dioxide and sunlight to produce energy for themselves in the form of glucose; but these climate models neglected the question of how plants may react to higher percentages of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Studies in recent years have shown that some plants are actually growing larger, taking advantage of the excess CO2 and producing more glucose.

Until now, this effect has been poorly understood, but this latest study has taken a look at how the photosynthetic process itself is changed in response to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

The team found that higher levels of carbon dioxide led plants to keep more CO2 than needed for respiration and use the excess to produce fertilization agents, causing them to grow more robust. These bigger and stronger plants then needed more carbon dioxide than normal to sustain themselves.

It was found that plants exposed to higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, like plants across the world have been for the last century, pulled 16 percent more CO2 from the air than those kept at “normal” levels. This could potentially make up for the errors in previous climate models, but more studies need to be done to confirm the effect.