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Earth Releasing More CO2 Than Originally Thought
grqb writes "A new study out of the UK suggests that terrestrial sinks across the planet are mopping up much less carbon than predicted, on balance, and so the planet may warm at an even faster rate than expected. The study focused on the carbon content in soil at 6000 sites in the UK between 1978 and 2003 and found that the soil released the equivalent of 8% of the UK's total 1990 carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions are more than the entire reduction in emissions the UK has achieved between 1990 and 2002 as part of its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well."
Earth as in soil, not our planet.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well.
In this case we have the earth releasing CO2 into the air, something we really don't have the means to stop. Although the net effect might mean the same emissions as before, at least the man made emissions are being reduced, that's what un-natural. If the earth is going to release some CO2, that's something that would have happened anyway. So that's not exactly "cancelling out" the effect.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
No. It's called The Carbon Cycle. "Soil" (as opposed to "dirt") is composed of decaying plant matter, decaying because it is being metabolised my microoganisms, a process that releases the CO2 the plant bound in itself over its life.
If the total biomass remains roughly constant, a plant grows for a plant that dies, the system remains roughly in balance, as the new plants absorb the CO2 released by the dead plants.
If, however, the bio mass is declining. . .
KFG
cyanobacteria.
Well, the earth is huge. Sure, humans have a huge impact on the earth, but the area we occupy is a small percentage. Volcanos put out large amounts of CO2. The believe that when earth was a complete snowball (entirely covered with ice) it was the volcanos putting CO2 into the atmosphere which warmed the earth again (despite the high reflectivity of the snow/ice).
One of the approaches I've read about which would be high-impact for low effort would be to seed the shallow seas with powdered iron. From what I've read that is sometimes/often the limiting factor on growth of algae is the lack of iron. So the idea is to add iron to the system, the creatures (not sure if it's just algae, or diatoms or what) grows and sequesters CO2 and sinks to the bottom of the oceans. Of course this can cause lots of problems while the environment changes (red tides kill fish...), but may be our best bet to stop the CO2 increase.
Here's a link I found on 'gardening oceans'.
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This doesn't only apply if the bio mass is declining. It also applies if the bio mass changes. Such as the introduction of plants with shorted lifecycles such as crops in the industrialized world.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
It's not "crap", it's CO2. It's not pollution, it's a natural and necessary component of our atmosphere. The issue is about the balance.
What would it entail?
More plants. Probably the most efficient way, as they do it without being plugged into a generator.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Not to mention destroying the soil itself, which is also an ecosystem in balance.
KFG
The entire argument is bogus. Katrina is NOT caused by global warming. You have been brainwashed by the stupid political activists. There were more destructive CAT 3-5 Hurricanes in the 1920-1940 period than there have been any time since then, including this decade, so I guess we had a ton of global warming during 1920-1940? NO. Katrina is a natural part of normal storm cycles. The sky is not falling. You may resume normal activities now.
-David
The rate of increase of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is easily and accurately measured. We KNOW how fast greenhouse gasses are going into the atmosphere. So the premise that "soils are absorbing less than we thought, so warming will occur faster than we thought" is fatally flawed.
Until 2000 I worked in a climate research lab - not as a scientist; I was a tech. Here's what the actual research (that the article twists) probably found. It is well known that atmospheric CO2 is increasing less rapidly than our models predict, because we don't know what's providing the sink for about half of what we're generating. So it's likely that some British scientists had speculated these soils were part of this "missing sink" (bad pun intended). However now they know they aren't as much of a factor - so the search will go on.
#DeleteChrome
it'd be interesting to hear by what mechanism the earth's oceans would be higher in some places, but lower in others
Actually, the pacific ocean is about 20 cm higher than the atlantic.See http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/puscience/#3 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_canal for more in-depth information.
The Earth emits more CO2 than most people are largely aware of. It's easy to figure out what humans create (buth by technology and breathing... 6 billion people can't be having only a negligible effect)
Other things, both natural and man made, include coal mine fires, Volcanos that on average release 145 million to 255 million short tons of CO2 annually, not to mention an equally immense amount of SO2. Check out Mammoth Mountain in California's Sierra Nevada range. The National Park Service has closed it to camping because it emits so much CO2 up through the soil that it can kill humans who stay in the area too long. It killed a lot of trees, too. Estimates state that Mammoth Mountain emits 50-150 tons of CO2 per DAY, which might cast doubt on the earlier estimate of how much volcanos produce.
I'm not going to suggest that we don't care about man-made emissions, but I think more study will find that it pales in comparison to nature. And what do we do if we find that the earth is warming up with or without our effort? Do we try to cool it down?? Might be something to think about, if in the next few thousand years Mankind eliminates "harmful" emissions to only find that the planet's trying to kill us anyways...
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
1. Tides -- may be stronger or weaker. 2. Variations in the Earth's gravitational field.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Volcanic releases are about 1% of the amount which is released by human activities. World total carbon dioxide emissions in 2002: 24,126,416 thousands of metric tons - pretty much exactly 100 times the maximum volcanic output per year.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
>The UK business market continues to decline
Gosh, that statement is so vague as to be almost immune to attack. But a couple of broadsides:
Stocks are going up http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EFTSE&t=my
The economy is growing, despite a dangerous asset bubble in the housing market. I'm sure you'd like to pin that on Kyoto as well - it'll be fun to watch.
But anyway, while the UK economy is far from perfect, it's hard to see how it's declining.
> as burdens from Kyoto compliance
What burdens, precisely? Reducing your emissions by a few percent is trivial compared to the mess that Messrs Sarbane & Oxley cooked up for us.
>make UK's unionized labor even less efficient on a global scale
Unionised labour? What unionised Labour? http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=4
Maggy pretty much got them back into rational behaviour, and even Tony's not stupid enough to allow the union's to take over again.
As for global efficiency, that's probably more down to a ridiculously inefficient and expensive goverment, and decades of a stupid education system, than Kyoto.
> More lives will be lost and more suffering will be created than any CO2 emissions can create.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. Even if there were an onerous Kyoto compliance regime trying to drive the UK economy into submission, how would that cause dramatic loss of life?
>Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base.
Have you always suffered from a persecution complex? I mean, I hate regulations and taxes more than most people I know, but at least I don't base that dislike on a bizarre conspiracy theory.
no taxation without representation!
pls mod parent down, calculations are utter bs
900g x 6 x 10^9 = 5,4 MILLION tons, not billions
Ratio of carbon to hydrogen in liquid fuels is about 1:2. The ratio in coal is about 0.6:1. Since carbon weighs 12 and hydrogen weighs 1 we get 12/14 of liquid fuel is carbon by weight and (0.6*12)/(0.6*12+1) of coal is carbon by weight.
CO2 has an atomic weight of 44 so we get one tonne of oil * 44/14 makes 3.1428 tonnes of CO2. This is almost pi tonnes I guess. In addtion we get 18/14 = 1.2857 tonnes of water.
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Now what needs to be recognized is that CO2 levels during the Ordovician were 13x to 19x higher than now and the earth cooled by about an average of 22C. This demonstrates that the CO2 levels at over 5000 PPM are not enough to warm the planet out of an ice age. In fact CO2 levels of 5000++ PPM are not enough to KEEP the planet from going into an ice age. When we go into an ice age we lose large amounts of water vapour and thus it is much easier to keep the planet out of an ice age than to lift it from an ice age.
Water vapour in the tropics literally is 80,000 PPM and it really is many times more powerful as a green house gas than CO2. Water vapour levels over a ice sheet are practically zero.
So CO2 is being given a bad name by people who know very little and do bad science.
About all an increase in CO2 will render on the planet is the ability for plants to grow a little faster. If course there are biologists such as David Suzuki who have suggested the increase in CO2 will overwhelm the ability of the plant life on the earth to absorb it.
How stupid. He must have done at least some plant physiology in his undergraduate years and if so he will know that standard green house practice is to increase CO2 levels to increase growth rates.
The truth is that photosynthesis evolved about 3 billion years ago and at that time the CO2 levels were about 20% of the atmosphere. 20% is about 200,000 PPM
The headline for this posting (Earth Releases More CO2 ...) illustrates why discussions about the theory of global warming are often so wrong-headed and confused. The reported data is about CO2 emissions in the UK, not Earth in toto. With a few words, these results are scaled-up to the whole planet!
Consider evidence the North American continent (and that includes a lot of guilty emitters) is on balance a carbon sink, based on data that's way more justifiable than most global temperature trend studies. Why? In part, in the States, we've been reforesting. In a generation, the USA will have as many trees as when the Pilgrims arrived.
Yes, I don't think smog is good. I don't think diesel fumes that give urban children asthma are good. But the environment qua religion and what's become the faith-based doctrine of global warming will seriously bias and waste resources dealing with the problems we can solve.