Who would have ever guessed trees store carbon by utilizing the gas of plant photosynthesis, carbon dioxide, and in an “immense, profound” way? From the Institute of Arctic Biology, where they seem to see no positive benefit to this, but worry about fires and insect damages instead. In a previous story, it was shown by NASA that the biosphere is booming thanks to CO2.
World’s forests role in carbon storage immense, profound
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
14 July 2011
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Until now, scientists were uncertain about how much and where in the world terrestrial carbon is being stored. In the July 14 issue of Science Express, scientists report that, between 1990 and 2007, the world’s forests stored about 2.4 gigatons of carbon per year.
Their results suggest that forests account for almost all of the world’s land-based carbon uptake. Boreal forests are estimated to be responsible for 22 percent of the carbon stored in the forests. A warming climate has the potential to increase fires and insect damage in the boreal forest and reduce its capacity to sequester carbon.
“Our results imply that clearly, forests play a critical role in Earth’s terrestrial carbon balance, and exert considerable control over the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” said A. David McGuire, co-author and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology and co-leader of the USGS Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.
The report includes comprehensive estimates of carbon for the world’s forests based on recent inventory data. The scientists included information on changes in carbon pools from dead wood, harvested wood products, living plants and plant litter, and soils to estimate changes in carbon across countries, regions and continents that represent boreal, temperate and tropical forests.
The authors note that understanding the present and future role of forests in the sequestration and emission of carbon is essential for informed discussions on limiting greenhouse gases.
– 30 –
ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: A. David McGuire, professor of landscape ecology, Institute of Arctic Biology, USGS Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, 907-474-6242, admcguire@alaska.edu
AUTHORS: USDA Forest Service, Newtown Square, PA, USA. Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, 100871 China. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093 China. Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, USA. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Victoria, Canada. School of Geography, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria. Global Carbon project, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Canberra, Australia. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE) CEA-UVSQ-CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK, USA. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Email is the best method for contacting McGuire. The abstract for the paper, “A Large and Persistent Carbon Sink in the World’s Forests,” is available at: www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1201609
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No sh[*]t Sherlock…
[Language .. Robt]
This focus on Co2 as the basis of all funding and research is going to be the undoing of most of the Western Economies.
All decisions seem to be based on the idea of the influence or manipulation of Co2 in some way.
The contradictions of logic and thinking flow like rivers.
This has surely got to end in tears. Probably ours.
No wonder the knight wanted a shrubbery…
All I see here is a paper that will be used to make rich countries pay even more in REDD (pay countries with huge forests to store our excess carbon) wealth transfers.
The Warm Is Bad meme is very strained. This story illustrates how idiotic it is.
Well, soon enough they’re going to figure out what life is all about…
“Until now, scientists were uncertain about how much and where in the world terrestrial carbon is being stored.”
Unitl now? Sorry. They are still unsure.
All of this global warming based faliling about is assinine absent a closed carbon budget, which we aint got within 25%. Half of the carbon that we think we are releasing into the atmosphere every year doesnt show up in the atmosphere, and nobody knows where it goes.
Attempting to count all of the carbon in the world is an arrogant exercise, and pretending to have done it to any useful degree of accuracy is deceptive.
I think papers like this one which really just quantify the size of the elephant in the room really puts the “settled science” into its true perspective.
To stay on theme, I am reminded of the mouse who lusts after an elephant. The “settled science” mouse is so conceited not only that it imagines the elephant reached a climax thanks to its “skill”, it really thinks it has got the elephant pregnant.
Methinks the elephant is about to take a dump.
Oh my! So, if we convert the trees into paper, use that paper, and bury it in land fills, we’re sinking carbon dioxide?
Meanwhile, back at the obvious!
If we accept that man made CO2 is responsible for global warming (and I don’t). Then all we have to do is preserve the forests that we have already and plant new ones. The trees will provide valuable wood which can be harvested and the world will be a much prettier place. It seems to me to be more logical to have a mechanism to remove existing CO2 in the atmosphere than to try to slow down it’s addition,
I keep telling people that the easiest way to do buried carbon sequestering is to put tree byproducts into a landfill. Stop recycling that newspaper! Start carbon sequestering it!
In related news, food production is up significantly. Scientists are concerned that this may encourage higher population growth leading to worldwide famine.
Quit slipping into the Warmist’s trap, folks. CO2 has MINIMAL impact on the climate and MAXIMUM impact on the carbon (life) cycle. Our atmosphere isn’t that far above the CO2 threshold for life, and given the slightest opportunity, these life-sucking warmers will make it even more difficult by getting us all to voluntarily support their insidious plan. They’re death mongers, and we should be against ’em every step of the way.
@Jeff +1
I’ll believe they’re serious about AGW when they stop paper recycling and start cutting down the old growth forests for cheap toilet paper. Don’t forget that termites produce far more CO2 than humans do!
Next they will re-discover that Carbon and oxygen are absorbed from the air, six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen.
Or maybe next they’ll start to re-discover some of the animal species that they have “thought” (claimed) to have become extinct.
Oh Waite!!
“Extinct” rainbow toad spotted after 87 years
“…straight out of every scientist’s sweetest dream. Yes, researchers recently found three living rainbow toads that were previously thought to be extinct in the jungles of Borneo.”
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/57242-extinct-rainbow-toad-spotted-after-87-years
But reintroducing extinct species can cause mayhem…
The extinct species back from the dead and causing mayhem
The reintroduction into the wild of creatures like the beaver and sea eagle that had previously died out in Britain is endangering the countryside, an influential group of vets has warned.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/conservation/8642359/The-extinct-species-back-from-the-dead-and-causing-mayhem.html
And according to trends, it seems the king of the jungle is next on their list to go extinct, for awhile at least, before becoming a miraculous “back from the dead” news story in a fue decades.
Lions Could Be Extinct in 10-15 Years!
“…they are lovable, too. But, unfortunately, there’s some really bad news: their numbers have been shrinking tremendously over the last 50 years! While, in 1960, there were a healthy 450,000 lions in wild, in 2010, were only 20,000! If that trend continued, lions would become extinct in just just over 10 years.”
http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/20110718/lions-could-extinct-years.htm
Yes, we learned that when I was in Grade IV (in 1946). We also learned that much of the carbon-dioxide had been converted millions of years into Carbon that many of our fathers dug out of the coal mines in which they worked, with the evidence being in the form of the imprints of exotic plants, such a some ferns, that could be found in the coal they mined. Moreover, we learned that things no longer grew so well or at all where we lived on account of it being so much colder.
I always though that it would be so much nicer if we would have such a beautiful warm climate and no one would have to bother with mining and burning coal to heat homes for so much of the year. But what did I know? I was only a ten-year-old kid and had no idea yet that, just 50 years later, CO2 in the air would be identified as a villain so bad that even just a little more of it would kill us, contrary to all evidence of much yearned-for comforts.
Good thing that there are so many learned people now to set anyone straight who still thinks that having tropical growth all around is not comfortable but sure to be Hell on Earth. Maybe they should all spend more time living where Hell freezes over for most of the year, every winter, North of the 49th and farther up North. I think that it was a smart move to leave most of that for the British.
Meanwhile, we have enough coal here to last at current rates of mining for at least another 1,500 years. You want some of it? Burn and recycle it. It’ll make the trees grow.
Maybe the global warming people have it all wrong – it is not the emissions that are causing global warming, it is the deforestation. Since the rate of deforestation is (supposedly) declining this could explain the resent leveling off of the temperature.
“A warming climate has the potential to increase fires and insect damage in the boreal forest and reduce its capacity to sequester carbon.”
A warming climate also has the potential to remove the fundamental growth constraint on the Boreal forests that these guys think hold all of the land based carbon – the length of the growing season. In fact, the ‘we are all going to die from global warming’ computer models predict exactly that: that the boreal forests will benefit from warmer temps, longer growing seasons and increased moisture predicted by the GCMs. Their growth rate (i.e. carbon sequestration rate) is expected to increase – I belive by 15-20% in the boreal forest that I live in.
So how come these clowns chose to comment only on bugs and fires instead?
B…I…A…S.
The ‘warm is bad’ meme certainly is wearing thin. Fearmongering masquerading as science.
Makes sense…..
Around 400 million years ago, CO2 levels tanked when plants took over.
Then tanked again around 50 million years ago when grasses started spreading……..
Plants can keep CO2 levels low enough that it’s limiting to plants.
Could I also add, not only do they store carbon, but TREES ARE NOT THERMOMETERS.
This may be a case where “stimulus spending” actually works. We stimulate the carbon based lifeforms of the world with cheap (waste) CO2 and we get increased production of shrubbery.
The number reported in the Supplemental as the annual average over 2000 to 2007 (in billions of tons Carbon):
Sources:
Fossil Fuel and Cement +7.6 bt
Tropical Deforestation +2.9 bt
Total Sources: +10.5 bt
Sinks:
Oceans (net) -2.3 bt
Tropical Forest regrowth -1.7 bt
Non-Tropical Forest growth (net) -2.3 bt
Total Sinks: -6.3 bt
Net Addition to the Atmosphere (rounded): +4.1 bt
(Each 2.13 billion tons of Carbon equals 1.0 ppm in the atmosphere)
(Multiply the above numbers by 3.67 for billion tons of CO2 versus just Carbon alone).
(Each 7.8 billion tons of CO2 equals 1.0 ppm in the atmosphere).
I thought almost all life on earth was carbon based. Doesn’t organic chemistry refer to carbon compounds? Don’t green plants require CO2 for photosynthesis? When I read articles like this I wonder where in the world did the authors of these studies go to school. I’m an accountant and I’m beginning to realize I’ve probably learned more about chemistry and biology in the few courses I took in high school and college than all these so-called scientists. Where are these people getting their masters degrees and PhD’s? And who are the idiots that think these people deserve funding? If the American taxpayer is paying for this garbage, then Speaker Boehner and the rest of the House Republicans should have an easy time identifying things to cut in the budget!
Ian H says:
July 18, 2011 at 4:11 pm
In related news, food production is up significantly. Scientists are concerned that this may encourage higher population growth leading to worldwide famine.
Brilliant!
You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can, but it will seem as if it wasn’t made up.
HypoCarboneum – Fear of carbon.
The Aliens have landed, and begun their Phase I of their conquest plan by brainwashing the Earthlings into burying all their carbon. When the food chain collapses, they’ll move in for the Phase II kill.
Earth is saved only by the ineptitude of the sequesting plan. The CO2 won’t stay put, and leaks spring up everywhere.
Send lots of Green Money, and I’ll hire George Lucas to make the blockbuster Sci-Fi thriller.