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."

Comments

So, deserts are good?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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...

Not just a joke

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Re:Not just a joke

[olof_the_viking]

The H2O is a really good greenhouse gas too, you know: http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watervapour.html

Re:Not just a joke

[TapeCutter]

Yes H20 is a GHG, however what many people fail to mention is that the atmosphere is currently saturated with H20, as can be evidenced by dew drops forming in deserts before the sun rises.

In other words, pump as much steam as you like into the atmosphere and all it will do is fall out as rain/dew somewhere else.

Re:Not just a joke

[KnightNavro]

Got snark?

Methane matters. The 100-year potential is 25 times higher than CO2. The shorter timeframe potentials are higher, and the long timeframe potentials are smaller. In the grand scheme of things, the 100 year potential is a reasonable one to use because it's looking at enough of the future to matter, but not so long as to look beyond what humans can effect in a (relatively) short time.

This isn't the media twisting figures. the 100-year GWP is almost always the one used by the media. The green groups will try and use a shorter one when they're attacking a methane emitter (i.e. landfill), or a longer term one when they're discussing something like sulfur hexafloride.

Re:At what point does ythis break down?

[zappepcs]

I've heard one theory (no citation, sorry) that as the solar system moves in alignment with the acretian? disk of the Milky Way this affects solar sunspot activity. That would affect global climate. The thought was changes in space radiation hitting the sun affects it's activity, much as radiation is believed to cause lighting in storms. It's a theory, and sounds plausible. There just is no evidence as yet as to whether this is true and how much it would affect global climate.. The Sun has been quiet lately? There is clearly a LOT of things that we are not taking into account yet.

Sooo...

[bsDaemon]

Is this why all the oil is in the middle east?

Re:At what point does ythis break down?

[demonlapin]

CAFE is crap for really reducing emissions; it gave us the SUV as family vehicle (because station wagons, the former family machine, were subject to CAFE as cars, but SUVs, as light trucks, were not). You want higher fuel efficiency, tax the hell out of gasoline and diesel the way the Europeans do. Simple and easily enforced.

CAFE is just another bureaucratic boondoggle, though it does have the merit that those who can afford larger cars subsidize the purchase of econoboxes.

Re:PDF

[sumdumass]

Not everyone is surfing the interweb on their dual core pentium with 3 gigs of memory. That is where the problem is.

I'm not using it at the moment, but my palm running linux sucks when I hit a large PDF. My 486 laptop that I use to interface with the car computer which also allows me to surf the internet isn't very happy with them either. Of course with that, I could also just VNC to the car computer but then it would reguire me to install a desktop and I'm still not sure it would be "stable".

I'm sure there are people with a lot difference configs that aren't quite as old as mine that have issues with large PDFs that cold just as well be served by an HTML page or Pages.

But back on topic, the 35% seems to be more then the amount we are shooting for reductions in with tools like Kyoto and such. Now I know that this isn't a new source that would replace Kyoto but it does show that either the Current models are wrong in some way (perhaps insignificantly), we have another unaccounted for source of Co2 and GHGs, or that the Co2 isn't the source of the heat or the problem. Or it could be a combination of those or something I haven't thought about. Either way, we are owed an explaination on this and how the models are accurate without this knowledge seeing how the KEY factors in global warming is how Humans are producing all this Co2 that will kill the world even though the so called fix only removes about .005 of the problem gas.

Re:Not the whole story

[TapeCutter]

Good points. Interestingly there is a lot of Methane bubbling out of the melting permafrost, particularly in E. Siberia. However the last two IPCC forecasts for increased Methane concentrations have failed to materialize, ie: levels have remained relatively stable for a decade after a steadily rising trend a few decades long. I consider the "missing methane" and "collapse of the Artic sea ice" to be the two biggest errors in the IPCC forecasts.

Just a thought but perhaps this new discovery is connected to the "missing methane"?

Re:Not the whole story

[TapeCutter]

Glad you noticed that the errors I chose support different conclusions by different un-scientific groups. An error is an error regardless of which conclusion it supports. Errors do make a model less reliable but they certainly don't make them useless ( as can be witnessed by everyday interaction with the internet ).

The most pessimistic estimates of the (winter) 2007 IPCC report had the summer Artic being "ice free" by around 2050, GHG "alarmists" at the same time were saying ~2030, now 2015 is looking not unreasonable. Last years melt was so dramatic that large shipping companies have been seriously contemplating the feasiblity of opening new shipping routes across the pole. Meanwhile a considerable number of scientists are still looking behind the couch for the missing methane.

Re:Not the whole story

[kenboldt]

Meanwhile, the Antarctic ice is growing. wow, who would have thought that systems and cycles on this planet are dynamic and will constantly change and adapt. I don't claim to know all the answers to questions related to climate change, but I do know that there are far better ways we can be spending our money than on "man-made CO2" which may or may not have an effect on climate change. We know with certainty that pollutants in our water have negative health effects, we know for certain that toxins in the air we breath have negative health effects, but hey, lets forget all that and focus on something that occurs naturally in the environment with or without human influence.

Re:At what point does ythis break down?

[mmurphy000]

CAFE is crap for really reducing emissions; it gave us the SUV as family vehicle (because station wagons, the former family machine, were subject to CAFE as cars, but SUVs, as light trucks, were not).

That's a matter of rewriting the CAFE law. It's not like SUV-as-light-truck is some fundamental constant in the universe.

You want higher fuel efficiency, tax the hell out of gasoline and diesel the way the Europeans do. Simple and easily enforced.

Except:

• That gives slow, indirect impetus to car manufacturers to increase the mileage of cars and light trucks. No doubt that, over time, they'll get there. But in the interim, you've sucker-punched the drivers, who are caught with limited alternatives — you can't buy cars that don't exist, and there are only so many hybrids manufactured and Jetta TDIs imported. Raising CAFE in line with gas price increases forces the car manufacturers' hands more quickly and directly, and consumers already have plenty of incentive to buy more fuel efficient cars merely due to rising gas prices.
• Raising gas taxes sufficiently to even give slow, indirect impetus to car manufacturers — in line with European taxes, as you note — is political suicide, not just for the candidate, but for the candidate's whole party. Raising CAFE will cause car manufacturer political donations to switch sides, along with the votes of Michigan residents, but otherwise likely will be seen as positive.

If you can figure out a way for fuel taxes to overcome those two problems, that'd be excellent. I'm not exactly a CAFE fan myself. It may be the answer is a hybrid (pun lightly intended) of raising CAFE and increasing gas taxes.

Re:Not the whole story

[TapeCutter]

"Meanwhile, the Antarctic ice is growing."

Well yes, it's the middle of winter down here.

Aside from that the Antartic is pretty much behaving as expected ( more snow up high, more melt around the edges ). The one place that is changing rapidly is the Antartic pennisula where temp rises have been three times the global average because of a phenomena known as polar amplification. Polar amplification has been forecast by the models since the 90's.

Even if you think we are not facing serious changes to our climate that could descimate global food production, surely a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels would go a long way to solving some of the other problems you mention. Personally I would like to see all pollution cleaned up but that's not going to happen in my lifetime.

Re:Not the whole story

[TapeCutter]

"This is what I'm wondering... if we think climate change is rampant and coming fast, why haven't we started MOVING THE FARMS up a zone yet?"

Melting permafrost will be a huge swamp for decades/centuries. Here in Australia the SE is getting drier and the NW is getting wetter, however the soil in the SE breadbasket takes centuries to create. This is not to say that there won't be any good surprises, perhaps removing the Artic ice will lead to an explosion of phytoplankton that will suck up some C02 and feed a lot of fish.

"It's kind of weird that such rampant warming can cause frost in Florida and snow in Iraq."

Looking at the globe in thermodynamic terms the rise in temprature stirs up the atmosphere a bit more, raising the Earths temp by a few degrees takes an enourmous amount of energy. Models predict more extreme weather events but the jury is still out on an observable trend.

Anecdotally here in Australia we have had similar frosts kill our fruit whilst experiencing heat waves, drought and a cyclone that wiped out our entire bannana crop, I've seen news reports of snow falling on bushfires about a half dozen times over the last couple of summers. The year before last the fire season came 2 months early and was the worst I have seen in my 50yrs. The drought is said to be the worst in at lest 600yrs in a country that's dry at the best of times. The Murray-Darling basin no longer flows into the sea and has been that way for 6yrs now, one good harvest in the last 10yrs, other harvests have been down ~50%, we are 4th largest grain producer, every capitail city is on water rationing ( something that Californians may have to suck up soon, we have found that a 10% drop in rainfall translates to a 30% drop in run-off to storage ).

However all we can say with any certainty is that AGW is compounding existing land use problems and they will likely get worse before they get better.

The grape thing has a grain of truth to it, there was a warm period during medieval times but this has now far surpassed it. AFAIK nobody has a good eplaination for the ME warm period but I hear there are wineries in England that grow their own grapes.