How the World's Agricultural Boom Has Changed CO2 Cycles

An anonymous reader writes Every year levels of carbon dioxide drop in the summer as plants "inhale," and climb again as they exhale after the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the last 50 years has seen the size of this swing has increase by as much as 50%, for reasons that aren't fully understood. A team of researchers may have the answer. They have shown that agricultural production, corn in particular, may generate up to 25% of the increase in this seasonal carbon cycle. "This study shows the power of modeling and data mining in addressing potential sources contributing to seasonal changes in carbon dioxide" program director for the National Science Foundation's Macro Systems Biology Program, who supported the research, Liz Blood says. "It points to the role of basic research in finding answers to complex problems."

Comments

Problem?

[WalksOnDirt]

How is this supposed to be a problem? The plants are sucking out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while they are growing, then releasing as they decay. It's interesting that it is noticeable, and bravo for measuring it, but I don't see any troubles that this will cause.

Re:Problem?

[growingtedium]

It's an academic problem. The problem is: our models don't explain the variation in the CO2 cycles that we were seeing. The solution to the problem is to include this research and adjust the models.

Re:Problem?

[able1234au]

True but slower growing and slower dying. Less in, less out.

Re:Problem?

[able1234au]

There is no Northern Hemisphere "bias". It is just that there is more land in the northern hemisphere and more cropland. So it influences the seasonal cycle more. There would be no CO2 advantage to moving the crops from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. It would be nett neutral.

Re:Problem?

[blind biker]

In this context, "problem" was meant as in "mathematical problem", not environmental.

Corn Subsidies

[Kaenneth]

The political influence of big corn is killing us; HFCS, Corn for fuel instead of growing food, lack of biodiversity... we should be growing a fraction of the corn we do.

Re:Corn Subsidies

[Mashiki]

Scratch an environmentalist, find a malthusian.

Re:Corn Subsidies

[Spy Handler]

Nobody has to volunteer to suicide or murder. All we need is for each person to have 0 or 1 offspring. It wouldn't take many generations before population reaches optimum hunter-gatherer levels.

Most slashdotters are already doing this (0 or 1 offspring), we just need to convince the rest of humans.

Re:Corn Subsidies

[swillden]

No convincing needed, its happening naturally and just a question of when the peak is Total fertility rate 1950–1955 : 4.95 2010–2015 : 2.36 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Yes and no. What you say is true, and further it appears we've already reached and passed the maximum number of children born per year, in absolute terms. But the population is still growing because the world population is youth-heavy. Assuming we stay on the current trend of gradually declining births and assuming we don't start living longer than 100 years in large numbers, this means the world population will stop growing at about 10B, then start a very slow decline, but that will be far above the levels Spy Hunter thinks we should reach.

I don't think I'd want to live in Spy Hunter's world, though. I certainly wouldn't want to live the "hunter-gatherer lifestyle", which was fully Hobbesian (nasty, brutish and short). In some senses perhaps those people were "healthier" than we are today, but they experienced a lot more pain and died a lot sooner. I suppose Spy Hunter is theorizing some world in which we eat like hunter-gatherers but live in a technological civilization, but that seems like a silly approach when we can, instead, continue our research into human biochemistry to understand exactly what humans need (with much more precision than "eat like hunter-gatherers", who almost certainly never got an ideal diet) and into food production, until we can create food that is healthy (ideally so), safe and flavorful.

Re:Gay Sex! Agenda 21.

[epyT-R]

Why not just end welfare that encourages pumping out babies by poor, uneducated people?

The Final Solution

[SuperKendall]

Studies have shown that the paleo diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat. And we all know that the earth is overpopulated.

So what you are saying is we know we all should be eating mostly meat, and there's way too much meat on two legs wandering around.

HMM...

Re:Gay Sex! Agenda 21.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or end welfare for big companies who pay minimum wage to their employees and then teach them how to claim food stamps and other government support?

You know, stop taxes being spent helping businesses rip people off.

Re:Gay Sex! Agenda 21.

[guises]

Because that wouldn't actually reduce the number of babies, it would just make them poorer and less educated. We certainly do need to reduce the population, but there's no evidence to suggest that welfare programs, daycare, foodstamps, etc., are contributing to the birth rate. Even when the payouts of those programs are tied to the number of children that the recipients have. In fact there's some evidence for the opposite, that using welfare to alleviate some of the very worst effects of poverty can lower the birthrate.

Not enough though, clearly, welfare isn't the magic bullet that's going to bring the population down. Unfortunately, a lot of people use the fact that greater prosperity goes hand-in-hand with lower birth rates as an excuse to ignore the problem... I suspect that this is something that isn't going to be even widely acknowledged, let alone solved, until an awful lot of people have died violently.