National Academy Of Sciences - Carbon Storage Programs Useless

[hatrack]

New research from the University of California has found that as the rate of emissions increases, the ability for the Earth to absorb those emissions is lowered - rendering well-meaning carbon-offset programmes useless.

The study, posted online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, is based on a computer simulation of the global carbon cycle developed by Inez Fung and colleagues with support from the National Science Foundation's climate dynamics program.

It examined how rising carbon dioxide emissions affect the ability and capacity of the Earth's natural carbon repositories - such as plants, soil, rain, clouds, bacteria, phytoplankton and oceans. The researchers used observations from the past two centuries to project the coming century. Their major finding was an inverse relationship between the rate at which carbon dioxide is emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and the capacity of land and ocean to absorb it. The faster the emissions, the less effective were the carbon sinks.

The reasons are various. On land, global warming tends to dry out the tropics and reduce plant growth, which in turn reduces photosynthesis and carbon uptake. In the oceans, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere mixes fairly rapidly into the upper layers, down to about 100 metres or so, from where it slowly leaks into the deep ocean and remains sequestered. However, rising temperatures warm the upper layers making the ocean more stratified and meaning the carbon dioxide cannot mix so readily downward.

EDIT

http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=10386&channel=0

[enki23]

1. that's pretty much what we're all afraid of, isn't it?

wicked positive feedback, like a planetary blood clotting cascade. where is the point of no return? how's that for a rhetorical question? i think we've gone right by it, by now. we just don't know it yet.

[NNadir]

2. This is pretty obvious. Not that it will get through to our coal boys.

I feel like all we are doing is watching the catastrophe. We are not doing anything at all about it.

We have dunderheads on the right saying their is no problem at all - heads in the sands - assholes raised and burning on the sun.

On the left we still have people who think this tragedy can be undone with stupid drunken illiterate statements about what they "might" "could" "can" do in 2050.

This is horrible. We all bear responsibility.

[struggle4progress]

3. On the other hand, tropical deforestation may contribute 20% of GHG:

cf Tropical Forests and Climate Change, John Roper, April 2001
http://www.rcfa-cfan.org/english/issues.13.html

[hatrack]

4. Deforestation combined with peat-bog releases

What really made the Indonesian fires of 1997-98 and 2002-03 so epochal wasn't jut the massive amounts of timber being consumed. It was the exposure, drying and eventual combustion of enormous peat mats which forest clearance exposed.