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Breakthrough In Artificial Photosynthesis Captures CO2 In Acetate
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Berkeley Lab and the U.S. Dept. of Energy have created an artificial photosynthetic process that capture carbon dioxide in acetate, "the most common building block today for biosynthesis." The research has been published in the journal Nano Letters (abstract). "Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future. Technologies for sequestering carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere are being pursued but all require the captured carbon to be stored, a requirement that comes with its own environmental challenges. ... By combining biocompatible light-capturing nanowire arrays with select bacterial populations, the new artificial photosynthesis system offers a win/win situation for the environment: solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide."
yet no one ever correlates the increase to deforestation of rain forests.
They do. Deforestation is a well known part of the CO2 problem. But fossil fuels are a bigger part.
We can very easily attribute what degree of co2 increase is due to fossil fuels because co2 from fossil fuels has a isotopic signature:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=384
In the 70s and 80s ozone was the big concern, and we changed some of the chemicals we use in our products because of it.
Now as we have learned more and as the world has changed there is a new concern.
Europe and Asia (where the former has few forests left [...]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Canada and the United States 26%
European Union 35%
And from
http://wdi.worldbank.org/table...
Europe it was 36.5% in 200 and 37.9% in 2012.
Not sure how good these statistics are, because it says 'Canada &United States = 26%' and then 'Canada =31%' and 'USA= 30.84%'... In any case, Europe has more forest area atm and amount of forest is growing rather than decreasing.
Or did you mean Europe has few forests left compared to situation from 2000 years ago? I can agree with that, but I don't think that global warming is THAT old - we used to have some mini ice age in meantime I think...
Only if your definition of "mature" is the peak-growth period of the trees and not a forest which has stopped growing.
You've got to take it on a species-by-species basis. Take, for example, Sequoia Sempervirens. Right up until the trees fall down because they outgrow their root systems, older trees put on more mass and thus fix more CO2 than the same area filled to capacity with younger trees.
Even trees which aren't getting taller are often getting thicker, so the question for a given species is whether younger or older members put on more mass for a given area. Virtually all of the non-water mass of all vegetation is carbon, and nearly all of the carbon of all vegetation (even relatively high soil carbon users like corn) comes from the air.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The sun is _slowly_ brightening - this is happening on timescales of tens to hundreds of millions of years. The fact that CO2 was significantly higher tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is not super-relevant to today's conditions, but it helped keep temperatures bearable in the distant past, when the sun was fainter. We are adding CO2 at a rate that is essentially instantaneous compared to the effects of this solar evolution, they are even still extremely quick on the much shorter (tens of thousands of years) timescales of the Milankovitch-cycles (which are the orbital cycles which are the underlying cause of our glacial-interglacial variation in the past few million years)
What interests us at this time is what we are doing to our atmosphere over a period of tens to hundreds of years, and what effect that has on timescales of tens, hundreds and thousands of years - even if we humans stop all of our CO2 emissions (except breathing of course), the increased concentration versus "before" will be considerable thousands of years into the future, as will the effects of that increase on climate.
So stating "still at the extreme lower end of historic levels" is technically correct, but practically misleading, as it suggests there's nothing wrong with CO2-levels.