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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."
How about a PDF warning on that link, editors?
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.
How about we say the deserts allow the earth's thermal system to reach a balance? We have more deserts, which sequester more carbon, which makes us cooler, which sequesters less carbon, which makes us hotter, which makes more deserts.
We shouldn't worry about global warming, we should worry if we can survive global warming...
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.
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No, it means that global warming isn't the disaster the proponents would have us believe.
What? Why? Deserts haven't suddenly started doing this now that we've found out, it's been happening the whole time and yet climate change is still happening. If anything this just highlights how far beyond the Earth's capacity to handle our greenhouse gas emissions we've already gone, and continuing on in anything like our current rate will result in far worse problems than previously believed.
"No, it means that global warming isn't the disaster the proponents would have us believe."
You need to think that through a little deeper, nothing in this discovery changes existing observations of the upward trend in GHG concentrations, nor does it change the observed temprature trends, nor suddenly refreeze the Artic, reverse the melting of glaciers, fill the dams of SW Australia, restore the oceans ph balance, etc, etc.
There is nothing wrong with being skeptical but be aware that skepticisim is a skill, not an instinct.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Trees are still much better CO2 scrubbers than other plants. Rush Limbaugh is fond of pointing out how much CO2 is absorbed by suburban lawns, but most of it goes back into the atmosphere when the lawn is cut. By contrast, most of the carbon sequestered by trees is not in the leaves, but in the woody parts. And it remains sequestered for hundreds of years, or longer depending on what happens to the tree when it dies.
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.
Yea, or by an alternate, but equally possible line of thinking: maybe CO2 isn't the only factor, since much more of it gets absorbed than we though in the first place? Maybe we should look harder for the other pieces and stop just wasting $$$ on computer weather models that predict oh-so-politically-useful disaster? ;-)
The point I am making is that the proponents of doing something about global warming NOW and at ANY COST do not KNOW what is going to happen. They can't, they have no hard evidence, no comprehensive theory on it, just a 'consensus that CO2 is the cause of global warming'. Last I checked consensus doesn't make something hard science, evidence does.
And I'm not saying nothing is to be done, we just need to be careful not to hop into a big trillion dollar bandwagon with Al Gore and the UN just to look dumb and swindled afterwards. I'm just taking Obi-wan's advice, that politicians cannot be trusted. Or bureaucrats, in the UN case. :-)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
True, but CH4 + 3O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O, which won't take long in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and just gives us carbon dioxide back; the same carbon dioxide that was absorbed when the leaves grew in the springtime. Meanwhile the tree on the ground has grown over the course of the year, and locked up a bit more carbon in the form of wood.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Unless you are skeptical of global warming. Then you will be compared to Holocaust deniers and threatened with losing your academic funding and credentials.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Sure, as long as you don't skimp on the sandworms.
Only on slashdot could this be modded Informative.
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.
Which just goes to prove that having the job title "scientist" is no indication that you have the slightest clue about the climate. Point me to the research of a serious climatologist that believes this, and I'll read it with interest. Papers by people from outside that specific field - not interested! (hey, I'm a "computer scientist", would you like to read my paper about psychology?)
This might seem like a fair point but it isn't. Lets look at the scientists. I'm neutral on this, but I dislike the hysteria that seems to have gathered around each side. And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).
My major problem with this is that "climatology" is a difficult field. It combines geology, meteorology, atmospheric research, marine research and a few others. But by and large, the doomsday predictions are coming from a group that are climate modellers. These people build up computer models of the climate and tune them using data from the past. The models are then used to attempt to predict the future of the climate.
And they're all dead wrong. The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are. None of them are predictive. And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing" and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right". Building scenarios based on them is like playing with lego, you tend to end up with what you were looking for.
Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).
Some highlights (emphasis mine although it's all interesting):
It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter K depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.
He goes on - the portion on how the models are verified is interesting
The point of this post is: hysteria solves nothing. We need to calmly move forward with rational solutions to the pollution that is caused by people, not suggest incredibly radical measures that are simply not going to be accepted by any but the most lunatic fringe. Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.
Rational thought is the only true freedom