It certainly means more CO2 is being taken up in the global biomass. Not enough CO2 is being taken up by the biomass to prevent global concentrations of CO2 increasing though.
The other worry is that as global land temperatures increase the release of CO2 from soil increases as well (bacteria in the soil will rot vegetation down quicker). So, even though the mass of vegetation over land increases, the carbon in the soil decreases and the land becomes a net source of CO2 rather than a sink. For example Cox et al 2001 : Acceleration of global warming due to carbon cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model, Nature, 408, pp 184-187
This might place the graph in that article into a little more context
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/simple_average/>
The bottom graph show the HadCRUT3 monthly mean timeseries from 1850 onwards.
Some of the big peaks and troughs in the monthly mean timeseries of global surface temperature are from El Ninos (when the Tropical Pacific warms) and La Ninas (when it cools), e.g. you can see the big peak in global temps during the 1997/98 El Nino.
We're presently going through a La Nina,
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html>
which partially explains why the global surface temperatures are so cold. When La Nina ends in a few months time expect the global temps to go back up.
Global warming (aka climate change) is the long term upwards trend in global surface temps.
Lindzen, R.S. (2003) The Interaction of Waves and Convection in the Tropics. J. Atmos. Sci., 60, 3009-3020
There are quite a few others in the past twenty years. I'm no great fan of Linzden myself but there's no denying that he has contributed quite a lot to the literature on climate science.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly means more CO2 is being taken up in the global biomass. Not enough CO2 is being taken up by the biomass to prevent global concentrations of CO2 increasing though. The other worry is that as global land temperatures increase the release of CO2 from soil increases as well (bacteria in the soil will rot vegetation down quicker). So, even though the mass of vegetation over land increases, the carbon in the soil decreases and the land becomes a net source of CO2 rather than a sink. For example Cox et al 2001 : Acceleration of global warming due to carbon cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model, Nature, 408, pp 184-187
ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_monkeysrel=url2html-10233http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_monkeys>
This might place the graph in that article into a little more context http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/simple_average/> The bottom graph show the HadCRUT3 monthly mean timeseries from 1850 onwards. Some of the big peaks and troughs in the monthly mean timeseries of global surface temperature are from El Ninos (when the Tropical Pacific warms) and La Ninas (when it cools), e.g. you can see the big peak in global temps during the 1997/98 El Nino. We're presently going through a La Nina, http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html> which partially explains why the global surface temperatures are so cold. When La Nina ends in a few months time expect the global temps to go back up. Global warming (aka climate change) is the long term upwards trend in global surface temps.
Here's one of Linzden's recent peer review papers
Lindzen, R.S. (2003) The Interaction of Waves and Convection in the Tropics. J. Atmos. Sci., 60, 3009-3020
There are quite a few others in the past twenty years. I'm no great fan of Linzden myself but there's no denying that he has contributed quite a lot to the literature on climate science.