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."

Comments

Re:"Earth"

[kfg]

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

Bad science... writing

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.