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

"Earth"

[42Penguins]

Anyone else puzzled at first at how "Earth" is releasing CO2 into space?

Re:"Earth"

[kfg]

While cutting down (with fossil fuel burning machines) an equal mass of immature trees whose constituant matter is not returned to the soil from which they grew to grow new trees to absorb CO2.

First learn barance, Daniel san. This redistribution of biomass is trickier than it looks.

KFG

Cant WE mop up some of the CO2?

[eggstasy]

Please dont flame me, I am not a chemist or a physicist or any sort of scientist.
But if the alternative is to have most of the world's coastal cities suffer the same fate as New Orleans, why can't we put some thought and money into actively extracting CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere instead of merely cutting down emissions?
I know that it would take a lot of energy and currently most energy sources add to the pollution problem, but still, is it even possible to somehow filter the crap from the atmosphere? What would it entail?

Re:Cant WE mop up some of the CO2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose what we'd need to do is figure out some way to permanently trap a whole crapload of carbon. Some of the natural ways to do this include peat bogs and huge forests, but neither of these options, as far as I know, are particularly easy to engineer. (The huge forest option is particularly not-ideal, because only living trees really trap carbon. Rotting vegetation is supposed to release CO2 fairly quickly.)

Probably a decent way of trapping carbon is to do what oil reservoirs did: get as much organic material as possible, chuck it into a big hole, and bury it under enough pressure that any possible gasses can't escape. And, as a bonus, in a few million years, our distant descendents could dig it up again as oil.

Re:Cant WE mop up some of the CO2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I Am a Physicist. In fact I'm a Solar Physicists.

Globe Warming is based so much more on the sun cycle than the green house effect that it's funny how much work is being done on that part.

The sun and earth have cycles. In the mid 1600's we had a rather low point in solar activity, the number of sun spots was quite low indicating a lower solar temperature. Since then it's gone in phases. Around 1800 there was another relative min in what's know in the little ice age. The Rhine froze over then.

Look, I'm not saying there's not a human effect, but it's small compared to Solar cycles. We've seen drastic shifts before and again. In the era of the Vikings, you had a major successfully run agrarian society in Sweden, Greenland, and Iceland. While in Roman and pre-Roman times their were stories about wine crops in Britain. In "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" crop failures of these are mentioned as one possible cause of Imperial collapse. Libya used to be a major bread basket even.

I'm gonna get flamed for even suggesting Global Warming isn't all it's cracked up to be, but climate shift has happened before and again. Unless someone wants to control the sun, it's not gonna be pretty.

Heck, I'm more worried by some signs that the sun is started downward now. If it's true, and we reduce CO2 too much, we are gonna have major global cooling.

Re:Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

An 8% difference is inaccurate as hell? Many modellers would call field validation to within 8% a triumph for the model.

not the only problem

[chasingporsches]

indonesia peat burning emits 1/7th of global CO2

i'm surprised this wasn't mentioned as well.

Re:not the only problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I might be able to buy this if the claim were 1/7 of global man-made CO2, which is something less than 5% of global CO2. The greatest sources of CO2 remain rotting vegetation, termites (yes, the little bugs) and volcanos. The first human activities occur farther down the list, below even several mammals' herbivorous digestive tracts.

But saying that buying Ikea furniture contributes to more CO2 than most natural events is just silly.

Re:Careful with your real estate speculations...

[Dun Malg]

Other reports claim that sea levels in some areas would actually drop.

Curious. Is this the "sea levels" that includes inland seas and lakes; or the ocean levels, which is usually what they're talking about in the context of global warming? If the latter, it'd be interesting to hear by what mechanism the earth's oceans would be higher in some places, but lower in others.

Re:Neat! --- Great

[AvitarX]

Soil released 8%

that is really not all that much.

In other news...

[dada21]

The UK business market continues to decline as burdens from Kyoto compliance make UK's unionized labor even less efficient on a global scale.

More lives will be lost and more suffering will be created than any CO2 emissions can create.

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.

Really?

[nwbvt]

"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."

I didn't realize the UK had ratified and began working on their commitments to Kyoto back in 1990, 15 years before it went into force and 7 years before it was written.

Now that I think about it, it would probably make more sense to ratify it before it was written. After all, the only potential effect it could have would be to destroy our economy and thus reduce our ability to respond to climate change using technological means.

Re:Bad science... writing

[yuiop]

I used to be a paleoclimatology research assistant. We would use fossil mollusca (basically, dead snails) that lived in lakes 20,000 years ago. By analysing the isotopic ratios in their shells, we could measure the climate in the year that they lived. (Actually by analysing each growth segment separately, we could see how the temperature changed throughout that year, which was a bit eerie.)

Data like this, along with many other sources such as ice cores and fossil tree rings and stalagtite isotopic ratios and many other things gives us fairly reliable information about the climate tens of thousands of years ago. We don't know what the temperature was on a particular day, but we can tell what the average was in a particular few centuries, and our confidence is increased by having so many different sources to correlate together.

Then, all this paleoclimate data is fed into the existing computer climate models that other scientists have brewed up. If they can then successfully generate the climate of the last 20,000 years given the initial data (and successfully predict all kinds of information about today's world that we can verify such as oceanic circulation and CO2 levels), we can - presumably - be fairly confident they are giving us good data for the next 1,000 years.

That is one reason why we have confidence in climate models when they tell us the world is getting dangerously warmer... and why most climatologists I worked with are nervous (at best) or terrified (at worst) right now about global warming.

The whole Earth? or just the UK?

[SidV]

Well according to the article, it's only happening in the UK correct.

Good thing North America is a Net Carbon Sink
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9774264&dopt=Abstract

http://www.climatechangedebate.org/pdf/FanPaper.pd f

And before someone says it's warmer since 1998, no it's not. Thanks the El Nino of 1998 we saw a tremendous spike, and tempreatures are cooler today than then.

Re:Global warming is a natural cycle...

[Anonymous Coward]

  When are people going to accept the fact that the Earth goes in cycles? There have been and will be ice ages and warming cycles regardless of what humans do.

I think everybody accepted that long ago (except perhaps our creationists friends). What you don't seem to realize is that a "quick" natural climate evolution (a few degrees change) usually occurs in 5000-10000 years. The models we use today are all predicting a similar change (even if nobody knows exactly how much) in 50 - 100 years. 50 to 100 times faster. The consequences are unpredictable, but the last event of this magnitude we know of killed the dinosaurs.
Try to read this for a more detailed analysis :
http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/gr eenhouse/only_action.html

And I strongly suggest you to read the rest of this site before posting anything again on that subject.

Hopefully by that time we will have established self sustaining colonies in space and on the Moon and other planets. Only by getting humans off the planet will survival be better assured.

Yeah, of course. I'm sure that it will be easy to send more than 6 billions people in space in less than 100 years. I let you do the maths on how much space rockets (and fuel) by year that represents. And I suppose that you plan to do that after we finished to consume all of earth's fossil energy, aren't you ?

The Soil CO2 emissions did not start in 1990.

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

Hey Dumbasses!

The emission of CO2 from soil has in fact NOT eliminated the benefit of the UK cutting their emissions.

The soil did not start emitting CO2 in 1990. It has been emitting CO2 all along.

The UK has still in fact reduced its overall emissions from industrial sources by the same amount, they just weren't aware of how big the rest of the CO2 pie was.

What a piece o crap article ... we better not bother cutting emissions because theres other things we dont understand! run in fear! hide hide! ... its better to go ahead blind and ensure that what we are doing damages the world we have to live in!