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Earth's Plants Are Countering Some of the Effects of Climate Change (economist.com)
A new study published in Nature Communications has found that Earth's plant life between 2002 and 2014 has absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere has slowed down, despite humans pumping out more CO2 than ever before. The study also found that between 1982 and 2009, "about 18m square kilometers of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth's surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States." The Economist reports: In 2014 humans pumped about 35.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That figure has been climbing sharply since the middle of the 20th century, when only about 6 billion tons a year were emitted. As a consequence, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising too, from about 311 parts per million (ppm) in 1950 to just over 400 in 2015. Yet the rate at which it is rising seems to have slowed since the turn of the century. According to Dr Keenan, between 1959 and 1989 the rate at which CO2 levels were growing rose from 0.75ppm per year to 1.86. Since 2002, though, it has barely budged. In other words, although humans are pumping out more CO2 than ever, less of it than you might expect is lingering in the air. Filling the atmosphere with CO2 is a bit like filling a bath without a plug: the level will rise only if more water is coming out of the taps than is escaping down the drain. Climate scientists call the processes which remove CO2 from the air "sinks." The oceans are one such sink. Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves. Towards the end of the 20th century around 50% of the CO2 emitted by humans each year was removed from the atmosphere this way. Now that number seems closer to 60%. Earth's carbon sinks seem to have become more effective, but the precise details are still unclear. Using a mix of ground and atmospheric observations, satellite measurements and computer modeling, Dr Keenan and his colleagues have concluded that faster-growing land plants are the chief reason. That makes sense: as CO2 concentrations rise, photosynthesis speeds up. Studies conducted in greenhouses have found that plants can photosynthesis up to 40% faster when concentrations of CO2 are between 475 and 600ppm.
good for us
Good for my gardens, my forest, my pastures.
Oh, wait, all of them are sequestering carbon to the tune of 1.4 to 2.7 tons of carbon a year. Hmm... This could be counter productive. The plants might use up all that carbon dioxide. Better startup your SUVs to make up for this and keep the farms flourishing!
But even better: Some good news!
..is released back into the atmosphere once microbes have had their way once the plants are dead?
This story brought to your future director of the EPA ?
Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves.
... until the plant dies, and wood/leaves either burn or rot, at which point the CO2 is released into the atmosphere again.
We'll also need some way of getting the plant material back under the ground if we want to keep the CO2 permanently out of the atmosphere. (yes, I realize that does happen, as that's where all the coal deposits came from, etc, but I do wonder what percentage of the new plants will end up that way)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Studies conducted in greenhouses have found that plants can photosynthesis up to 40% faster when concentrations of CO2 are between 475 and 600ppm.
That's nice. That's not sustainable, though. It's quite irrelevant what the plants will do under those conditions if we're well and rightly fucked before we even get there. It's also not universal. Some plants can do that. Some plants can't; they are already at or near their limits.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it didn't take long for spin to make the climate emergency less dangerous. Silly rabbits
Unfortunately, photosynthesis is not the only CO2 sink, as noted in the article: Oceans also take their share, and that cause their pH to drop, which in turns kills coral, and make coasts more vulnerable to erosion.
Somewhat misleading summary. CO2 only increases growth substantially when nutrients and sunlight are also in abundant supply. It does not affect all plant life equally. So not all areas will see the benefit of increased growth. Also as others have mentioned the mass of CO2 stored in plant mass is important but unless that mass keeps increasing quickly without dying out then it can't keep up with the supply. As it decomposes it is released back into the atmosphere.
Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves.
... until the plant dies, and wood/leaves either burn or rot, at which point the CO2 is released into the atmosphere again.
We'll also need some way of getting the plant material back under the ground if we want to keep the CO2 permanently out of the atmosphere. (yes, I realize that does happen, as that's where all the coal deposits came from, etc, but I do wonder what percentage of the new plants will end up that way)
I've wondered whether we should start putting carbon back into the ground, and whether this is feasible.
For example, suppose we harvested unused plant products (wood, silage, whatever), ground them into a slurry, and pumped them back into old oil wells.
This presupposes that we have transitioned to renewable energy, and that extra energy for such endeavourers is available. It looks like we're on the road to doing that - a theoretical factory getting its power from solar panels could make more panels than it needs for replacement, and there's a lot of opportunity for rooftop solar and panels in other places.
Assuming we can afford some extra solar panels and that we have reasonable automation, could pumping excess plant matter back into the ground help?
(Or perhaps compress the plant matter and drop it into the deep ocean, where it would be stored indefinitely.)
You fucking idiots, climate change operates on geological time scale and not decadal nor in the span of a human life time...fuck you people are stupid.
Yes plants release much of the CO2 they absorb back into the atmosphere - but most of it is stored in the very slowly decomposing parts of the plant, and some will remain in the soil.
However - over time as plants die new plants grow to replace them, basically making the net CO2 a slow reduction from the amount not released when dead... but on top of that as the Earth warms it will encourage more growth and therefore greater ongoing CO2 sequestration in living plants, and that means a greater ongoing reduction of CO2 from CO2 that remains in the soil.
What is missing from the equation are estimates of how much greater the biomass will become with higher temperatures and more CO2 (which greatly encourages plant growth). I don't know I'veever seen that factored in, and to me if nothing else figured in, that absolutely puts the breaks on any kind of runaway warming scenario from CO2 - the only reason we were supposed to be scared of CO2 to begin with. The Earth (and people) can handle a 2-4C warming just fine, and will in fact thrive because of it.
I wish people would just get past the voodoo nonsense that CO2 is the problem, when real pollution is the danger because it could affect plant life in the negative instead of the positive. Luckily much greater adoption of solar energy is inevitable now so even worries about future pollution are reduced, on top of that self-driving cars mean much more efficient use of a vehicles engine so that too leads to an automatic future reduction in real pollution.
It may be that we might yet escape the next ice age cycle if we can really boost the global temperature enough, though I'm doubtful we can really break free of a cycle that is so fundamental.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Suck it climate alarmists.
And the result is that plants start SECRETING Co2! Read the science. So, a reverse feedback loop.
See post title
Coral flourishes in lower pH conditions, and the ocean is used to higher levels at times that it will ever see from atmospheric CO2.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The fact that the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been growing more slowly than expected, based on how much CO2 is being created due to human activity, is not new knowledge. We've known that's the case for several decades... but identifying the "sink" has been problematic. For a long while it was assumed to be the oceans, but that was shown not to be true back around 1990-ish.
It looks like this paper is claiming to have at least partially identified the missing sink.
#DeleteChrome
They're countering CO2 concentrations which is why deserts are becoming greener and psytoplankton in seas across the globe are blooming at increased rates...
What does this mean?
It means that the planet has it's own natural mechanisms in place to stabilize the climate which is why life has existed here on this ball of dirt for so long.
So no, no matter how much fossil fuels we burn the planet will not allow us to go above 400 ppm evidently hence the pause despite the increased rates of co2.
help us cope with change.. climate or otherwise.
The sink in the oceans can't last - as more CO2 is absorbed, the more acidic the water.. and the less photosynthesis can be done since the algae dies due to the polluted water.
Slowing down does not mean reduction. Furthermore it is important to know that most plant live on land reduce their CO2 intake at certain higher levels of CO2 by closing their stomas. This results in less water vapor in the air reducing the reflectiveness of the atmosphere resulting in more energy intake.
Plants actually benefit from CO2
I may have heard this someplace before.
Back in the 70s a friend had a couple pot plants growing in his closet. He had a grow light and everything. About once a week we'd walk to the local Baskins Robbins, where they would give us a 1-2 lb chunk of dry ice. Mike would suspend this chunk some 3 feet over his plants, his plants seemed to love the hell out of it (hard to tell, they don't purr, or roll over for a belly rub, or anything, they just grow faster).
// Died 5/15 of Lou Gehrig's disease
/// A much better person than I am
/ RIP Mike
Allow me to translate this into English.
See that "Preview" button?
I am almost always mused by the "Scientist" that discover what is.
In other news study shows water is wet.
Where is this huge swath of land that previously didn't have any vegetation? Really sounds like Bunk..
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Somehow I doubt that highly. An area roughly the size of the USA 'newly green'???? I'd LOVE to see the whole data set to see where it has been misread.
I'll believe this when Santa comes down my chimney.
Wouldn't you expect O2 levels to go up in response to all that new plant life photosynthesizing?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
you can make "Oil" and "Coal" by heating/pressing plant mulch and it does not take all that much time at all (a proper plant can do like Tons per week)
heck for what its worth you could filter algae out of Seawater (discard the salt and water) and make lots of Oil
Open Challenge for the Bright Sparks: Create a Coastal Plant that creates Oil with as Green a setup as possible
(bonus challenge: Build it on a Floating Rig that can be Towed into place)
So maybe that explains why the blackberry vines seemed so aggressive this year.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
On all planets, fossil fuels is the first step. We will change and adapt like we are programmed to.
Wind resistance from outstretched arms will slow your fall off a cliff.
This is not news to people that have paid attention to the science of global warming. As much as the AGW alarmists scream about "science" you'd think that they'd stop screaming once in a while and do some actual science. But then if they had then they wouldn't be AGW alarmists.
The correlation between plant growth and CO2 concentration is not news to anyone that has even minimal knowledge of biology. CO2 is plant food, if you make more food available to them they tend to grow faster, stronger, and higher. It should be only a small leap in logic that natural plant growth will place a limit on the speed in which CO2 concentrations can grow and how high those concentrations can get.
What is finally making the AGW types pay attention to the science is that we haven't seen any real warming for two decades. What we'll see next is some articles about scientists noticed that the recent sea level rise has been happening for a very long time and at a rate that has been relatively constant for centuries.
I will stop just short of calling AGW a hoax because everyone involved knows very little on how the climate works. What I am quite certain about is that people have been using AGW as an excuse to grow government power and/or personally enrich themselves with "fixes" to AGW that are hoaxes.
A bad car analogy is having car troubles and focusing on only the left rear tire valve stem. With all the complexities to the climate it is madness to attribute any climate changes to only CO2 produced from human fossil fuel consumption. It is then further madness to not recognize the natural systems that have kept this system stable for so long and how that might interact with that increased CO2 output.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Good thing Trump arrived on the scene before the panicky humans stampeded.
Perhaps the situation would speed up those water cycle restoration projects? At least for now..
Actually, the greening of the planet has been predicted for a long time. So has the drying, burning, and desertification.
Other predictions have already come to pass, such as weather patterns behind the extreme cold caused by the polar vortex of Winter 2012 in North America. The weather in Michigan very much resembled "The Day After Tomorrow".
Climate change deniers simply like to imagine that scientists have missed a magic solution. There is simply too much data from too many sources to be denied any longer.
Which has been evident for quite some time is...
WHY is this not being allowed for in predictive models? Why should this is new to the people working on this?
We are regularly told how old the knowledge that atmospheric CO2 increases heat trapping is (and that is true).
And yet, models do not allow for increased plant growth rates, and increased total living biomass thanks to increased rain, increased average temperature, and increased CO2... The effects of those on plant grows is even older...
The easy assumption is because those mitigate the models significantly, therefore making the results less worth of funding.
That is, of course, the problem with the modern scientific 'method', it is all about media attention, publication success, etc. Not about actual science.
Come on guys, if you are going to model a system, leaving out the majority of active biomass matters..
You do realise that when a plant dies and rots (burns? really? that is a tiny TINY proportion) then the majority of the carbon in it ends up in soil, not as a gas, right?
I know you probably dont try this much in your inner city apartment, but try spending a bit of time in the real works.
This is exactly where SOIL comes from. I can guarantee you that if you put a box of lawn clippings on the ground somewhere, they do not evaporate into CO2.
There is of course some gas release (and a number of gasses), however the majority ends up captured. Go dig up some soil under a nice deciduous tree and you will find the soil is MUCH richer there..
No, there are a few scientists pointing at coral dieback, and global warming and shouting 'See! Correlation!'
Of course it is very simple to test, and you will notice that these particular scientists do not actually do such tests.
The ones who do (and the ones with ANY idea of coral history and historical ocean acidity) realise this is a load of bull.
Almost certainly coral dieback is caused by actual chemical pollution. You know, the stuff everyone ignores now that they have the bigger (and much more profitable) boogeyman of CO2..
As it happens, pollution caused coral dieback is also the cause of the 'pacific atoms vanishing below the rising oceans'. This, again is well known by the actual scientists who have studied it, and is clearly shown as the islands with overpopulation are the ones sinking, and the nearly islands without humans are growing.. damn facts getting in the way!
The problem is politics and money.. Pacific islands want money, and ocean researchers want money, and the evil global warming means money!
Because they havent, sorry to say.
In fact they have actively argued AGAINST including it, for a number of reasons, none of them sane - while avoiding the main reason, that it stops their models from producing such alarming (and therefore funding producing) numbers.
Actually, it is not quite true. A few have included some such numbers, however even those assume that biomas is a constantly REDUCING quantity.
Because, as we know, increased temperature, increased rainfall, and increased CO2 levels (the three things they universally predict) are all hated by plants, and reduce their growth rates..
Doh.
WHY is this not being allowed for in predictive models?
It is. CO2 growth rate is not generally an output of the models. CO2 growth rate is largely determined by what policies we put in place. The IPCC produces several projections showing how climate will react to mild, moderate, and high CO2 growth. Which pathway we follow is largely up to us.
, as your parent post linked, we've climbed off the hockey stick hock and now rocketing at maximum velocity toward oblivion.
IMHO the environmental activist community dropped the ball after Rain Forest preservation was the #1 agenda topic in the 1990s. In addition to being a carbon sink, the forests are the habitat for most threatened species. I was always lukewarm to Al Gore and 350.org for that political reason, they lost a lot of activist invested collateral.
Gently reply
I wonder if this is why I seem to have much worse allergies over the past 10-15 years, more weeds. A win for Flonase I suppose.
We'll make great pets
Can't we make rockets out of wood and launch them into space? Problem solved!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Really? Folks are still worried about something where the first variable is the sun, the scond variable precession and nutatation in the. sun/earth/moon system, the third variable water vapor, the fourth variable life, the fifth variable methane... what do all these variables have in common ? No ability for humans to affect them...
No matter your position on AGW, I think the good thing about this paper is that it shows we can make very real consumer decisions to impact the rate of global warming. It seems simplistic however the choice of a piece of fruit over a bag of chips impacts the amount of palm oil consumed for food products, which slows down the rate of deforestation in tropical regions for palm oil production, which slows the acceleration of global warming.
The salient observations from this study are:
highlights the need to protect both existing carbon stocks and regions, where the sink is growing rapidly. Anyone arguing that plants are having an impact on sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere is also arguing for an immediate cessation of logging as the study is saying is that forests (especially tropical) have to be protected for this to continue to have an impact on global warming.
So dumping that palm oil laden food (why do you want to eat that shit anyway) in our diets will have an impact restoring a lot of those tropical forests. That is a powerful tool in reducing atmospheric CO2. That is a strong argument against fast food products.
Global warming over vegetated land notably slowed since the start of the twenty-first century23, while atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise In other word go hug a tree and say thank you for absorbing some of the impact of global warming. Perhaps the reason people don't notice the effects of AGW is because trees are reducing the effect of heat islands in citys. Is there anyone *against* having more trees in cities?
I think the rate of ecosystem respiration (R_eco) in comparison to global land temperature in this paper is interesting. I wonder what the gross global mass of forests was during the measurement of the trends, and if R_eco is related to decreasing global mass of forest during the same period.
This could be a powerful tool for reversing the trend of shrinking polar ice caps by controlling deforestation. I was astounded to discover from a plant biologist that a single tree in a forest could move *70 tons* of water in one day. We were looking at a 30 odd metre tall tree and not a rain forest either.
So in addition to comparing gross global mass of forest from 1980-2000 I think it would be interesting to compare loss of polar ice from 2000-2012 when this study shows there was a *decrease* in R_eco. What is R_eco compared to annual polar ice accumulation?
recent reports suggest continued warming over oceans So where there are no trees, it gets hotter. Hotter over oceans, hotter in deserts, hotter pretty much where ever humans don't want to be, with the exception of cities where we use air conditioning and tend to hang out in parks and gardens near trees.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased from roughly 290p.p.m. at the start of the twentieth century to 400p.p.m. by 2015 In other words atmospheric CO2 increased by 110ppm in the 20th century.....somehow
slow the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 despite increasing anthropogenic emissions slow the 'growth rate' means it is still increasing. According to the study there is a lot of year on year variability and that *ALL* of the trees everywhere on earth (GPP) absorb roughly 2-3ppm CO2 from the atmosphere annually.
The slowdown in global warming is expected to be temporary however and may already have ended with the strong El Niño Southern Oscillation of 2015 and 2016 In other words it looks like the effect was temporary and that even with the effect, carbon emissions are not pegged at *any* level they are still increasing.
Without effective reduction of global CO2 emissions, however, future climate change remains a stark reality. If you are going to cite this paper as showing evidence that CO2 emissions are pegged at any level because of trees, you have missed the point and you are exhibiting signs of confirmation bias. A pause means it is a temporary effect.
The main thing I
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What the article's title means by "Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake" is simply that the growth rate over the last 14 years is constant, i.e. the rate itself is not increasing (as it had been for the previous 44 years). The growth rate is not zero. Its derivative, the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 with time, is zero.
The use of the word "pause" makes the result seem more dramatic than it really is, and is wide open to misinterpretation by climate change deniers. It is a pity that the journal and its reviewers did not pick up on this - but then dramatic headlines improve circulation, just as they improve researchers' careers. A paper with a less dramatic title might not have been accepted by such a prestigious journal.
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That is very very little. Could it be that SI-challenged writers confused "milli" and "Mega" suffixes, again, and they actually mean 18,000,000 (km)^2, rather than 0.018 (km)^2?
down the rate at which we'll reach the point where we have fucked our selves over. Lets pat ourselves on the back and burn more coal and oil.
The new plant life in the headline is from Global Warming melting ice. So you have to acknowledge AGW exists if you recognize that an area "twice the size of the US" has melted.
Also if you had RTFA you would have noted that the world can warm without increasing CO2. The plants themselves absorb heat unlike snow and the melting tundra also releases methane, a greenhouse gas substantially more effective at retaining heat than even CO2.
This is only a source of a short term blip on one specific statistic.