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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
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
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
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