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May
9, 2007 As climate change
becomes more
and more a central issue in local, national, and international
discussions,
understanding the global carbon budget, and how it influences trends in
global
warming, will become increasingly crucial. The carbon cycle is related
to
climate and climatic change because it controls carbon dioxide, the
most
important of the greenhouse gases. One of the world’s
preeminent experts on the
topic, Dr. R. A. Houghton, has authored a synthesis paper on the topic,
summarizing what is known about the global carbon budget and why it is
important. The work is featured in the current issue of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. In the paper, Dr.
Houghton
emphasizes that the key issue is to understand the processes
responsible for
adding carbon (sources) to the atmosphere and for removing it (sinks).
Such
understanding should lead to more accurate predictions of future
concentrations
of CO2 and more accurate predictions of the rate and extent of climatic
change.
The recent past may be insufficient for prediction, however. Oceanic
and
terrestrial sinks that have lessened the rate of growth in atmospheric
CO2
until now may diminish as feedbacks between the carbon cycle and
climate become
more prominent. Dr. Houghton
comments,
"Figuring out where all the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels
ends
up is surprisingly difficult, especially when one recognizes that there
are
only three places it can go: the atmosphere, the oceans and land
(plants and
soil). The long-time effort to understand this distribution of carbon
is giving
way to a related question of whether and how the distribution of carbon
will
change as more carbon dioxide is added to that atmosphere and as the
earth
warms. The natural processes on land and in the ocean that have removed
carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere for the last century may be starting to
weaken. The
oceans are becoming more acidic, and we see more fires in both tropical
and
northern forests. If these natural sinks for carbon diminish, global
warming
will occur more rapidly than predicted, and efforts to manage it will
become
that much more difficult."
This
text derived from: http://www.whrc.org/
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