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A Hidden Loop In the Carbon Cycle Discovered
Googlesaysmysiteisdangerousanditisn't! writes "A recent article in Science says that researchers in China and the US have found massive carbon uptake in the world's deserts. The effects of this are huge. 35% of the Earth's land surface is desert, and the uptake equates to 5.2 billion tons of carbon sequestered each year. This is more than half of the carbon released by humans. In these 'dry oceans,' the grains of sand allow the carbon dioxide to enter and react with alkaline soil to become carbonates. Another scientist suspects that biotic desert crusts, alkaline soils, and increased precipitation may be driving the uptake."
The solution is obviously to cut down more trees and make more deserts, right?
How about a PDF warning on that link, editors?
Does this mean that all the salinization that has been going due to irrigation because america grows FRUIT in the desert is actually a good thing?
Does this mean that scientists now think that we don't have enough deserts?
I'm all for global warming (it is cold up here in canada), but I'm pretty sure we've got enough desolate landspace...
so the MVP is not Kobe...but Gobi?
(or the sahara if u'r in africa)
So if I am reading this right, we could reduce global warming by creating more deserts around the world?
Now that just doesn't sound right at all.
Ok. So they've found a massive carbon sink that was unaccounted for. Great!
They also say that due to changing conditions, including increased precipitation, there is more uptake occurring.
Does this process ever reach a point where it stops? Is there only so much carbon that can be converted/sequestered? If conditions change enough, will this huge carbon sink disappear rapidly, adding a HUGE amount of carbon to the atmosphere?
This is fascinating, but it still feels to me like this situation could be as fragile as any others we've discovered around the globe.
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If this is indeed the case it would seem a bit strange that it has not been detected before. I mean with all the climate change debate going on there has been quite close scrutiny of the estimates of CO2 going into and out of the atmosphere, so if this is as big a carbon sink as described it would have to mean that the other sinks ( i.e the ocean and the biosphere ) are less potent than previously assumed.
Forests soak up a lot of carbon, but then drop a lot of leaves. When the leaves rot they give off CO2 and methane. Methane is far worse as a green house gas than CO2 - by a factor of over 20.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is this why all the oil is in the middle east?
... that what's being done here is our first real attempt at terraforming. There are some scientists who believe the climatic change we are seeing is not a by product of man's industrial activities but part of a natural cycle. It all depends on whether you believe that CO2 increases precede or follow temperature change.
If the climate change is actually a natural process then the attempt to control it has become our first great terraforming project. How convenient that we're trying this on the only planet we have and not some spare planet that wouldn't matter if it went awry.
"Each year, the Rainforest is responsible for over three thousand deaths from accidents, attacks or illnesses." - Rainforest Schmainforest and now forests are rotting and giving off greenhouse gases. We must act to stop these forests from further encroaching upon our Earth-friendly deserts, it is time we cleaned them up.
Study's have show that CO2 is irrelevant as a greenhouse gas.
We [all of humanity, as in not one single person on the planet] do not even understand 1/100th of 1/100th of 1% of how our planet works. A lot of people believe that we are making a huge impact, but if you really do look at the big picture, we [all of humanity] actually take up a very small percentage of the planet. There is a lot of uncovered ground and water that works to clean up after itself and us.
The planet is not out of balance, we are not causing that much damage and in most places where we have caused damage if we stopped it would be cleaned up all by itself in 5 to 15 years. Some of the more damaged places would self-heal in 15 to 50 years.
Yes, there are things we should be doing to reduce our impact. But this whole global warming, global climate change thing happening now is NOT caused by us. Well, some of it might be, but we cannot possibly know that. We have so few years of records in the history of the planet it's not even funny. How far back do ACCURATE temperature readings go back around most of the globe? 50 to 60 years. How many years do we have accurate temperature readings for what are now populated areas? Maybe 200, at most.
We cannot even begin to understand what is happening now. For all we know it's going to be getting very cold in the next 5 or 10 years. We don't know what kind of cycles the earth or sun have. We should just do what we can, do not do anything extreme in any direction, just recycle, use glass and paper instead of plastic. Don't go out buying a new car every 2 to 5 years, drive it til it dies, then replace it with an electric, hybrid, or high mileage car. Use recyclable and recycled materials. Boycott products, companies and events that "offset" their carbon usage by buying "carbon credits", that's only a money making scheme and nothing more, it's doing nothing for the planet. Go plant a few trees yourself and tell Gore's companies and new industry to go fuck itself.
Our scientists are smart, yes, but they have so much to learn and much, much more to teach us.
Methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Conincidence that this was discovered by 2 major coal producing nations?
I don't get how restating something we already know (that cryptogamic crusts and alkaline soils are part of the carbon cycle, and that deserts, which often have both soil crusts and alkaline soil in abundance, are an important contributor), is discovering some "hidden loop." More likely is that some shmo left out or undervalued the importance of arid systems in their model.
And since its scientific fact that Humans only provide 3% of the total carbon output per year, that means its only sequestering 1.5%.
Very interesting.
A nice littlle nuclear war plus aggressive deforestation should do it!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Quote: "There is in fact little understanding of how the position of the Earth/solar system in the plane of the Milky Way affects solar radiation et al and thus how it affects planet temperatures. Desert sand is not the cure, it is a possible cure. There are others, like cutting down on human CO2 emissions etc."
On the contrary. We know that there is an extremely strong correlation -- geologic and historical -- between earth temperatures and solar flares. Inverse correlation, actually.
The debate on global warming is over! Didn't you hear our politicians and celebrities say so? Everyone still looking for evidence is a neocon.
The effect could be huge: About 35% of Earth's land surface, or 5.2 billion hectares, is desert and semiarid ecosystems. If the Mojave readings represent an average CO2 uptake, then deserts and semiarid regions may be absorbing up to 5.2 billion tons of carbon a year.
Also...
For now, some experts doubt that the world's most barren ecosystems are the longsought missing carbon sink. "I'd be hugely surprised if this were the missing sink. If deserts are taking up a lot of carbon, it ought to be obvious," says William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who in the 1980s was among the first to examine carbon flux in deserts. Nevertheless, he says, both sets of findings are intriguing and "must be followed up." Scientists have long struggled to balance Earth's carbon books. While atmospheric CO2 levels are rising rapidly, our planet absorbs more CO2 than can be accounted for.
and...
Provided the surprising CO2 sink in the deserts is not a mirage, it may yet prove ephemeral. "We don't want to say that these ecosystems will continue to gain carbon at this rate forever," Wohlfahrt says. The unexpected CO2 absorption may be due to a recent uptick in precipitation in many deserts that has fueled a visible surge in vegetation. If average annual rainfall levels in those deserts were to abate, that could release the stored carbon and lead to a more rapid buildup of atmospheric CO2--and possibly accelerate global warming.
This is not, as some posters are implying, published science that concludes the IPCC predictions are in any way likely to be inaccurate, or that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere at a rate lower than previously thought.
This is a news article in science detailing some interesting research showing that deserts may be absorbing more carbon than was previously thought, and that this may account for the fact that atmospheric measurements show the earth is absorbing carbon at a higher rate than can be accounted for by currently known sinks. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known from atmospheric measurements, and is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.
If he uses a mac, safari doesn't show the status bar by default.
But if I told you what it is, I'd be astroturfing...
Actually, I'm getting the idea that for some people the goal isn't even to point fingers at something, but to point fingers at someone. Subtle but important difference.
Actually, even that is the superficial version. The longer one is that a bunch of people need not just to feel superior to you all, but to be a part of some grand cause that's never done or achievable. The last part is the more important one. It's what makes such grandiose tactually an _easy_ way out.
The quote which comes to mind, and kinda sums it all up, is, "It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task."
So people seek some grandiose cause to fight for, so they don't have to acknowledge that they don't achieve the small ones.
And again, it better be something so grand that nobody actually expects any given individual to achieve anything tangible. In a "small" task, like, say, "I want to finally get out of debt", or "I'll take some lessons and try to find a better job", or "I'll finally have a talk to my son about starting fights at school", there are very clear criteria as to whether you achieved anything or not. And at some point you have to admit that you didn't. It's not a very motivating thought. Worse yet, it might involve some personal effort and change. Good grief.
On the other hand, "saving the world" (from whatever global threat, from MS to global warming to God's wrath) is _easy_. It's a task nobody really expects you to achieve. So you can just moan and bitch a little about how the _other_ people should change, then be smug that you did your part. If it didn't achieve anything, it's because everyone _else_ didn't immediately drop everything and do as you said. Or even if they did, and it didn't actually work, hey, it's still their fault not yours: they didn't do enough, or didn't really understand you.
Big surprise that people choose the latter, eh? They're easy.
And it's not even something new. Since the dawn of time people have got into such grandiose fights to save others from whatever. For a long time, mostly from worshiping the wrong gods, or from worshiping them all wrong, or from some moral/philosophical detail that will doom us all. Mostly because they didn't have some scientific doomsday scenario, so God's Wrath was the best threat they had. Now they can do better.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> Methane is far worse as a green house gas than CO2
Your breath smells like ass.
I'm afraid you've bought in to a common lie. Human activity releases far, far more carbon dioxide than the volcanoes do.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The problem with CAFE was that it was indeed a boondoggle - the mandated efficiency improvements were actually less than were achieved automatically by European taxation levels, and as you note it was easily evaded with the "light truck" class.
Taxation of fuel is sensible because it is a tax on actual consumption. Most people are able to reduce their consumption by varied means - aggregated journeys, car shares, vacations closer to home, reducing acceleration, using mail order more - without changing their vehicles.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Does this by any chance screw up carbon dating?
Pardon me if that is a stupid question.
Courage is fear holding on a minute longer. George Patton
We have been emitting massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere for maybe 50 years. It's a simple physical fact that that must lead to global warming sooner or later; whatever has kept anthropogenic global warming under control so far has been homeostatic mechanisms that invariably will get overwhelmed if we keep growing our emissions.
We know what the climate would likely be like without human carbon emissions and other human changes to the environment, because it's the climate that we have been getting for the last 5000 years of human civilization.
You're also wrong to assume that "mother nature works slowly". Once homeostasis is gone, things can spiral out of control in a matter of a few years. That is what makes continued massive carbon emissions particularly risky: by the time we have definitive proof that they are dangerous, it's far too late to do anything about it.
What you are advocating is a massive, risky, global climate experiment, for no other reason than the short term convenience of some oil and coal companies. There is no reason on earth, economically, meteorologically, socially, or ecologically, to continue emitting massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the sooner and the closer we can get to pre-industrial levels, the better. It's the conservative thing to do and it's the right thing to do.
The real problem isn't nature, and to your point, the real solution isn't changing anything, it's dedicated research.
But we are changing something: we are emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, and our emissions are growing exponentially. That can't go on: either we stop voluntarily, or we run out of fossil fuel, or we get a climate catastrophe; there simply is no third possibility.
When you are saying that we shouldn't "change anything", you are actually advocating continuing a massive global change, a massive experiment with global climate. People like you are playing word games: you simply redefine what amounts to deliberate and massive change as "no change" by reframing the issue.
The earth is clearly a self-regulating system
Yes, and it can stabilize around many different points: something like we've had for the last few thousand years, an ice-free hot house, a snowball, or something completely different. All of those have happened in the past. All of them have led to massive extinctions.
That's what makes carbon emissions so dangerous: homeostasis will continue to mask the effect, but at some point, the climate will flip and change rapidly towards another equilibrium. And at that point, there is nothing we can do anymore.
Homeostasis ("robust earth") is what makes global warming so dangerous: changes seem small and hard to predict, but then suddenly become catastrophic.
...temperatures from 1961 to 1990...We in the Northwestern hemisphere have experienced 7 of the top 8 warmest years on record since 2001, and all 10 top warmest years since 1995.
So...you know that the Earth as a whole has been cooling since 1998, right?
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Your logic has one HUGE hole in it. This is not a fix. Its already part of the models that carbon is being sequestered - the only question was where. This research does not at all settle that matter anyway, but its in no way a demonstration that the accepted climatology is wrong in its evaluation of global warming.
The "Chewbacca" defense is not going to work anymore. If we find out that OJ bought the knife at a flea market, that doesn't somehow prove that he didn't do it. If we find that the desert is where the carbon we already know is being sequestered ends up, that doesn't say anything about climate change.
I've afraid you're the one whose bought into a common lie. Human activity releases far, far less carbon dioxide than the planet produces. We are minuscule in the big picture, nothing but ants.
I've afraid you're the one whose bought into a common lie. Human activity releases far, far less carbon dioxide than the planet produces. We are minuscule in the big picture, nothing but ants.
A common lie? Mainstream global warming does not even attempt to assert that man-made carbon dioxide is a big chunk of the total. The grandparent post was written by an idiot.
We need to setup bans on Dangerous Carbon Immediately before it is too late. Carbon is a killer pollutant and it is found in many poisons and noxious chemicals, but it can even be in your food!!!!
Nefarious users of Carbon.
- Carbon is used in dangerous Nuclear reactors designs that when exposed to radiation make it radioactive as well. It's misuse was responsible for the Chernobyl accident that claimed countless lives in Russia.
- All living things accumulate hazardous radioactive carbon from the air and end up incorporating it into their bodies. This carbon when it decays causes radioactive particles to be released that can damage our DNA, which in turn can lead to cancer and premature death.
- It is found in many poisons, In fact Cyanide has almost 50% carbon content by weight. Most Pesticides and Herbicides contain Carbon compounds as an active ingredients.
- It is found in food, sometimes in massive quantities. Carbon and carbon compounds have been found in the following foods: Corn, Wheat, Carrots, Apples, and even Tofu. Food preservatives contain Carbon as well so processes food isn't safe. It has even been detected in organic produce!
- Carbon is the main cause of Global Warming as the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide. It is also found in Methane which is a more potent greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide. It is also found in Chlorofluorocarbons which eat away and destroy our Ozone layer!!!! Carbon is not only responsible for our melting ice caps and sea levels rising it is also causing our ozone layer to be depleted!
- Carbon is one of the main components of oil which when burned causes all sorts of pollution to the air, water and earth. Waste forms of carbon are also filling up our landfills.
- Carbon contamination has been found in some people living near heavily polluted areas in concentrations of several percent of their body mass. Carbon and it's compounds accumulates in fat cells and can cause many different medical complications. In fact Carbon in the body can be detected coming from a person's breath!
- Carbon is even used in some dangerous medicines with dangerous side effects. Some medications actually use carbon as a key component. Remember the problems there were with Dangerous Mercury in certain childhood vaccines? Carbon was also found in those very same vaccines as well and nothing was done about it.
- Besides contamination of the human body Carbon may sometimes be detected in the following items which may even be in your house right now!!! Items such as: chairs, beds, eating utensils, home electronics, and even your i-pod!!!
- Clothing can also contain carbon as well. Clothing with carbon has been known to cause skin irritation and rashes. It can also cause heat stroke as carbon in clothing can also trap heat in the body much like it can trap heat in the atmosphere.
- Gems containing carbon and the greed surrounding them have been the cause of many conflicts in Africa and have resulted in the death and exploitation of many indigenous people across the globe. These Gems are called "Blood Diamonds" and they contain a very high amount of carbon which helps give them their luster and appeal. Make sure the Diamonds you buy for your significant other are Carbon Free.
What Can you do?
- Ask congress to pass a comprehensive ban on all products containing carbon and carbon producers.
- Be involved in community efforts to restrict carbon usage in all areas of life. Sign up for carbon drives where carbon containing products are removed from houses and properly disposed of. Craig's List is an excellent resource on setting up your own carbon drive.
- Check the labels on your food and make sure you don't eat any foods containing carbon. Avoiding food that contains carbon has been proven to result in weight loss!
- Ask your Doctor about medicines that might contai
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Indeed? Then I'd like to see your figures. Because we outdo the volcanoes by a factor of a hundred. Looking into other sources, well: rotting vegetation was mentioned, and I agree it's a far larger quantity than human activity, but is that a source of carbon dioxide? Rotting vegetation can never release more carbon dioxide than the amount it absorbed when it first grew, making it net carbon neutral. Unless there is a net decrease in the planet's biomass, there's no overall extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to plant life. Same goes for respiration by living things: the CO2 I exhale is carbon that was absorbed when my food grew, and will be absorbed again as a future meal grows.
We on the other hand are digging up and releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, all year, every year, and unlike the plants we're not taking it back out of the atmosphere. That's producing an ongoing year-on-year net increase in carbon dioxide. Nothing else on earth compares to human industry for increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Because we know that CO2 is increasing and there is descent uncertainty in known sinks, that means that it's likely that the the sources are also larger than we know about. In other words, deserts may be masking some of our activity (CO2 production) and, when and if this sink craps out, it will be all that much worse because we're making more CO2 than we thought we were.
While I wouldn't have a problem if the storms portrayed in the move The Day After Tomorrow actually occurred... I am not sure I could live in a world where Dennis Quaid is the key to survival... Thank goodness the deserts will save us!
It's a shame. Whatever Meringuoid's past sins were that he starts at zero, he deserves every one of your informative mod points. Let's hope the metamods do their job.
Notmysig
I am amazed that this is new information. Where have they been all these years? I am shocked.