Study - Natural Carbon Sinks May Be Smaller Than Thought - Potential Extra 1.5C By 2100 As A Result

[hatrack]

Oops.

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"We've been getting a free ride from forests and oceans," says Robert Jackson, a Duke University ecologist who heads the southeastern division of the US Department of Energy's National Institute for Climate Change Research. But "I'm not confident – especially as our fossil-fuel emissions continue to grow – that we can rely on natural systems to bail us out of this."

To be sure, few if any in the climate-policy community advocate a hands-off, let-nature-do-it-all approach. But the use of natural "sinks" – oceans, plants, and soil that can hold carbon – is said to appear in the report researchers and politicians are haggling over this week.

The document is a brief policymaker's summary tied to the third of three large volumes published every six years by the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The first two reports, issued in February and April, focused on the state of climate science and on the effects researchers already are seeing as a result of global warming. The current volume, by contrast, aims to suggest a target for stabilizing carbon-dioxide concentrations so that global average temperatures in 2100 would only be about 2 degrees C higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. The volume also describes medium- and long-term approaches that could achieve that goal and lays out estimates of the economic costs and benefits of emissions mitigation. Thus, it is by far the most policy relevant and politically sensitive of the IPCC reports.

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The latest caution about leaning too heavily on natural processes comes from an international team of researchers who have found that the ocean may be far less efficient at storing CO2 at the bottom for long periods of time than previously believed. As a result, models may be overestimating how much long-term carbon storage the oceans will provide. The group looked at the ocean's "biological pump" in a layer of ocean dubbed the "twilight zone." In the upper layer of ocean – the most studied region – plankton take up CO2 the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere. But much of the carbon gets converted back to CO2 in that layer and is quickly recycled back into the atmosphere. Only about 10 to 20 percent of the carbon in this layer sinks into the twilight zone, which begins some 500 feet below the surface. Using new measuring techniques, the team led by biogeochemist Ken Buesseler from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that only 20 to 50 percent of that carbon makes it to the ocean's bottom for long-term storage.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0503/p01s02-wogi.html

[necso]

1. "The picture is somewhat brighter on land.

Changing land-use practices to reduce deforestation, especially in the tropics, and encouraging farmers to convert some farmland to forest cover 'represent a bridge to the future,' ..."

With growing population, emerging economies' increasing demands for resources, a rising appetite for meat consumption (which requires feed), and a burgeoning demand for biofuels (etc), is this realistic?

...

When checking some numbers, I found this data (in "The World Factbook"): Sex ratio at birth: 1.07 male/female.

Enlightened self-interest is normally in short supply; many people routinely do very stupid, short-sighted things.