Carbon
Well, they’ve officially found evidence for anthropomorphic damage to the carbon cycle on Earth, reported here and the full Nature article here. This is apparently the first time the theory that the Earth has a natural cycle for dealing with carbon in the atmosphere has gained direct empirical support, and is hopefully a death blow to the people that try to argue that carbon gets eaten by all the trees in Maine or that the tooth fairy takes it away to Fantasy Kingdom. Of course, this won’t stop the people screaming about scientists are lying for whatever reason before demanding their antibiotics for their resistant staph strain, and then blogging about the experience on their semiconductor, thin film magnetism, and optics driven computers.
Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Jethro
Time: May 6, 2008, 6:24 pm
I fail to see how this is indicative of anthropogenic damage to the cycle itself. Whatever the carbon cycle on earth is, it dealt with periods above 1000 ppm of CO2 in the Jurassic.vGranted, no on really wants to live on the hot, humid earth that was the Jurassic, but somehow the carbon cycle coped with a concentration not only ten times that of today, but 50 times that of the local periods average.
CO2 may well damage other parts of the environment, but the carbon cycle represented here doesn’t seem to be damaged. The fact that Zeebe and Caldeira are worried about increased ocean acidification would indicate that this cycle is ramping up to deal with the excess carbon, to the detriment of other systems, like a spring pulled farther than normal. Maybe it’s a little too healthy and we should continue looking for alternative carbon sinks. Like cutting down those trees in Maine and preserving them against rot (as houses, furniture, dildos) to keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, and then plant new trees.
And if the fact that we can measure the ppm of CO2 rise over the last century directly doesn’t convince people about rising CO2, showing that continental weathering is highly correlated with prehistoric CO2 concentration in ice cores isn’t going to either. Nor will it silence arguments that CO2 isn’t that important a greenhouse gas or that a warmer world is a better world.
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