Comments airplanesocks has made

Missing carbon

The comment about nature compensating for part of our emissions could refer to two different things: the recycling effect of the biosphere (photosynthesizers) or the missing carbon  phenomenon.  The biosphere is a major carbon sink and a carbon reservoir-- the ocean and forests both take up carbon for photosynthesis (plankton in the ocean are very busy). However, the biosphere is calibrated, if you will, for a carbon cycle that doesn't involve massive emissions from stored carbon resources (fossil fuels),  so it isn't really equipped to handle extra carbon.
Since we have a good idea of how much carbon we've emitted since the Industrial Revolution (money makes people keep records), we have a pretty good idea of how much carbon ought to be in the atmosphere right now--and it isn't there. There is no certain answer at this point about where the carbon actually is; there are only three places that it can be hiding logically.  The ocean; the terrestrial biosphere; or the atmosphere (and we know it's not there).
The greenhouse effect is causing a 'greening' at higher latitudes--plants that couldn't survive at high latitudes because of colder temperatures are now able to move there because the temperatures are right for them--but that is unlikely to draw down enough CO2 on its own to offset that 7 Gt per year of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.  The ocean has a much faster turnover rate for CO2, so a number of people think that it might be there, as a dissolved gas.
In short, we know we're emitting about 7 Gt of CO2 per year (about 6 Gt in fossil fuel burning, and 1 Gt from deforestation),  but only 3.5 Gt appears to stay in the atmosphere. On 'Natural emissions dwarf human emissions'--But emissions are only one side of the equation posted 1 year, 6 months ago 5 Responses