Free Republic

Does the world owe Australia bezillions of dollars in carbon credits? With years of La Nina rainfall on arid outback Australia, “we” (or rather the citizen plants of Australia) have apparently been sucking down the CO2 at a phenomenal rate: “almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems.” But, sigh, call me unconvinced. I think what this paper demonstrates is that consensus and simulations are not worth much, and that we don’t know where global CO2 is going.And anyway, the Australian outback vegetation explosion is ephemeral. While there may have been a lot of  carbon sucked out...

Organisms living on tree roots do lion’s share of sequestering carbon Sequestration may be questionable fiscal policy, but it means good news in the context of carbon cycles. Vast underground networks of fungi may sequester heaps of carbon in boreal forest soil, a study suggests. By holding onto the element, the fungi do the environment a favor by preventing carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere and warming the planet. --snip-- But scientists have not understood where exactly trees put their carbon. The issue becomes important when researchers build computer simulations that track carbon cycling. “People talk about how plants...

Ecosystems haven’t maxed out ability to absorb fossil fuel emissions Earth’s ecosystems keep soaking up more carbon as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, new measurements find. The research contradicts several recent studies suggesting that “carbon sinks” have reached or passed their capacity. By looking at global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the new work calculates instead that total sinks have increased roughly in line with rising emissions. “The sinks have been more than able to keep up with emissions,” said Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo....

Scientists Close In On Missing Carbon Sink Science Daily — Forests in the United States and other northern mid- and upper-latitude regions are playing a smaller role in offsetting global warming than previously thought, according to a study appearing in Science this week. The study, which sheds light on the so-called missing carbon sink, concludes that intact tropical forests are removing an unexpectedly high proportion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, partially offsetting carbon entering the air through industrial emissions and deforestation. To study the global carbon cycle, Stephens and his colleagues analyzed air samples that had been collected by...

CHANGES IN RAINFALL PATTERNS SPUR PLANT GROWTH, CARBON ABSORPTION ACROSS U.S. (Click link to view figures) A NASA-funded study finds that changing rainfall patterns over much of the United States in the last century have allowed plants to grow more vigorously and absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In the presence of water and sunlight, plants take in carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis to create fuel, glucose and other sugars, for building plant structures. Better understanding of biological and physical processes that contribute to carbon uptake by plants will help scientists predict climate change and future levels of...