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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."
I'm buying land in warm, sunny Alaska.
Well... it'll be sunny and warm by the time I retire.
How is that cancelling out the emissions reductions? Aren't there less CO2 emissions overall because of those reductions? Aren't there fewer man-made emissions?
This would effectively cancel out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and would have wider global implications as well.
This would only be true if the soil would not be releasing CO2 prior to the recent reductions in greenhouse emissions.
Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty concerning the mechanics of CO2 emissions. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying to reduce them each time we find out that we are not the only source of CO2 emissions.
Cancel out? Its not like by trying to reduce CO2 in area X, another area Y produced more CO2 in response to reduction in X -- this is not the case, and while knowledge of what produces CO2 is not complete, it is just plain silly to imply that there was no point to even try reducing it!
If it had not been reduced then there would have been MORE of it, not less.
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
1) Plant a tree. ...
2)
3) Profit.
This ofcourse assumes you don't burn them later on.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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
indonesia peat burning emits 1/7th of global CO2
i'm surprised this wasn't mentioned as well.
So if you're investing in Global Warming, don't buy real estate -- too uncertain what will happen to it. You might consider wind farming...
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. Here is a report showing that the Earth is giving off more CO^2 that previously expected. So we change the models and get a new estimate on when things will become really dicey. 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.
The huge volcanoe that will erupt in Utah shortly along with a few other disasters will push us into another ice age quicker than most think.
A concerted effort to achieve relatively cheap routine access to space needs to be initiated. Hopefully the private sector will do what NASA has been unable to do.
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
Oh please. Spare me yet another gaiatribe. The Earth is a ball of spacegoing rock no more or less significant than any other similarly-sized chunk of cosmic debris. It has value to us because we live upon it, but Earth doesn't need "saving" and even if we set off every single thermonuclear device in our possession simultaneously we couldn't destroy it. And even if we could ... so what? Stop anthropomorphizing planets ... it's just silly. The Earth is not some living organism with an autoimmune system that is trying to eliminate an infection. We inhabit a thin, green paste on the outer surface of our world ... certainly we can render it useless to ourselves, but do you really think the planet gives a flying you-know-what whether there's life on it or not? I bet you believe in the tooth fairy too. Go on, admit it. You do.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Shhhh... don't mention any sources of global warming (or cooling) that can't be blamed on the following:
... you know)
1) The United States, generally
2) George W. Bush, personally
3) White males
4) Hummers (the vehicles, not the
5) Animal testing
6) Microsoft
7) Republicans
8) Amazon.com's patent portfolio
Good! Now, repeat after me: "All Hail Slashdot Groupthink! Flamebait == My Politics Differ! Troll = Possibly correct, but goes against my preconceived notions!"