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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!
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.
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.)
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.
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
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
That's nice. That's not sustainable, though.
The 350.org people are not living in reality, if they are your source of info, then you're just living in fantasy land.
Quote from your link:
âoeIf humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from [current levels] to at most 350 ppm.â
There is zero chance of that happening in the next 100 years, none, ziltch... It will hit 500 ppm long before it has a chance to stop climbing... it probably will hit 600 ppm before the end of this century...
Those people are insane. Notice they don't actually state what will be required to do that, they just say "conserve and stop burning stuff", but they never say HOW MUCH.
Do you know why? Because they know the truth, they know that if they actually publish the number, they'll get ignored.
The number HAS been published... the Western world has to cut 80% of its power consumption and the developing world 60% of its power consumption, and the whole planet has just 32 years to do it.
Now before you scream solar and wind, read the above sentence, then read it again, because I'm 99% sure you won't read it correctly the first few times.
There is zero chance of that happening.
Tamino makes a good case that these researchers are mostly wrong.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.
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..
I guess the only group that doesn't want money and has no political influence is the 1 Trillion a year fossil fuels Industry. If researchers were after money you would think they would go asking the deep pockets for it, not the tree-huggers. But than again if they were smart they would have picked a more lucrative career path to begin with
Tamino is Grant Foster, a statistician who does publish in peer reviewed literature. In my opinion, this will likely be published unless someone else beats him to it. That will at best take a long time, while this can show up immediately.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.