45
In 2010 anthropogenic emissions (not including land use change) were approximately 9167 million metric tonnes. Your data on trees holding 13 lbs (5.9 kg) of carbon per year equates to 169.6 trees per metric tonne of emissions.
So to take up all of the emissions from 2010 you would need 1,545,000,000,000 trees. A mature forest has only about 100 trees ...
25
The Tibetan Plateau uplift is still generally considered as playing a role in the Neogene cooling through the process you explained in your question (see for instance the seminal Zachos et al. 2001 and more recently Garzione 2008).
It is probable that other phenomena played a role as well such as the diversification of diatoms (which are, today, the most ...
16
Wouldn't a more beneficial method of disposing of such waste be to find a method of isolating them from the effects of weathering and keeping the carbon they contain locked up as long as possible?
You are ignoring a number of factors here.
A good deal of energy, much of it non-renewable, is needed to turn trees into paper. The trees need to be cut down (...
15
I'm not sure where and why has all CO2 gone every 100.000 years and out of where has CO2 come?
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for the last 400000 years is very strongly correlated with temperature.
Temperature change (blue) and carbon dioxide change (red) observed in ice core records.
Image source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/...
14
Summary
Most of the remaining stocks of hydrocarbons (coal, natural gas, oil) will have to remain unburnt. In almost all cases, that will mean leaving them in the ground. We already have proven technology to prevent new emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and in most cases, the technical and economic barriers are solved: the remaining ...
13
This has been in the news in the last week or so here in Canada:
Hippie Carbon offset business: 2013: Couple converts family land to ‘carbon farm’.
Using more wood in buildings from quick growing farmed trees as a long-term sequestration: Wooden skyscrapers.
From the Kyoto rules on what counts in this space, this document provides some good details also ...
13
Unlikely but theoretically possible.
As the bits of tree work their way down to the sea, they are going to oxidise and release CO2. This would appear to our eyes as "rotting" and breaking down. Leaves aren't going to make it, although they might get buried in river sediments.
Trunks might. Once they reach the open sea, they are going to have to become water ...
13
Borrowing an explanation from one of my other answers, the basic mechanism of the greenhouse effect is roughly as follows (note this is also a simplified model)
The Earth is in (to all intents and purposes) a vacuum, so it can only
gain or lose heat via radiation. The sun emits most of its radiation
at visible and UV wavelengths. The Earth's ...
12
The short answer is that people do talk about it. It is commonly referred to as "land use change". In general, the carbon dioxide equivalent of the effects of land-use change is on the order of 10% of the total anthropogenic contribution to CO2 emissions. This may seem small, but it is important to realize that land-based plants are only a portion of the ...
11
One method is through ice cores from the worlds ice caps.
Each year, as small amounts of snow accumulate on ice caps such as on Antarctica and Greenland, bubbled of air gets trapped. As we drill through the ice, we can identify the air samples in those trapped bubbles, and measure directly the composition of the air in those bubbled. It tells us much more ...
11
1.How much carbon is there on Earth?
Taken as whole, the Earth is estimated to be 730 parts per million carbon by mass.
So $4.4 \times 10^{21} kg$
http://quake.mit.edu/hilstgroup/CoreMantle/EarthCompo.pdf
How much carbon is there in the atmosphere (in the form of CO2 and CO)?
$3.1 \times 10^{15} kg$ CO2 and insignificant CO, so $8 \times 10^{...
11
First of all, the amount of carbon cycling trough the Earth's system is irrelevant to the discussion of the changes in atmospheric $\text{CO}_2$ concentration or ocean acidification. In the same way that the volume of water cycled by the filtering system of a swimming pool is irrelevant to the level of the pool. What matters are the net inputs and outputs of ...
10
No, we do not need to stop extracting petroleum, we need to stop burning petroleum, as well as other fossil fuels, because combustion converts solid C to gaseous C, and hence goes up to the atmosphere, increasing the amount of greenhouse gases that warm the planet.
No, we do not need to convert existing CO2 into diamonds. Plants are pretty good taking up ...
10
It seems like you are asking about proxies that are useful on the scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years. We have great proxies that going back thousands of years (tree rings, peat cores, lake sediments), and quite a few that go back around a million or so (speleothem, ice cores), but beyond that the data is in sediments and rocks.
Deep sea sediment ...
10
Huh, this is a very interesting question. According to a research paper:
The long-term carbon cycle is controlled by chemical weathering,
volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon
(1, 2). Ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are reflected in the
isotopic content of organic carbon (3) and, less directly, strontium
(4)...
10
Possibly
One thing you have to understand is that natural carbon sequestration via the formation of fossil fuel is VERY slow, it can take millions of years to build up the coal we burn in a day. In addition, one of the more dominant effects on the climate is solar radiance and continental position which changes over such long stretches of time, making ...
9
One way to lock some of the carbon in plant biomass into the soil for a very long time is, paradoxically, by burning it. While most of the carbon in burning vegetation does literally go up in smoke, turning back into CO2, a small fraction — around 1% to 5% or so — of it turns into ash and charcoal, collectively known as black carbon or pyrogenic ...
8
My understanding is that the fossil fuels we use for energy were
generated during the Carboniferous period by burying carbon rich plant
matter in anoxic swamps. If we are causing climate change by reversing
this effect, dumping tons of carbon back into the carbon cycle... why
recycle paper, or other products created, necessarily, by pulling
carbon ...
8
The short answer is that most of the Earth's original allotment of CO2 got locked up in various carbonate minerals, largely calcite (limestone, marble, and chalk). According to this article there is currently ~800 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere today; there is ~39,000,000 gigatons of carbon locked up in calcite minerals. All that carbon was once in ...
7
This question is from 2014 with answers from 2015. Just to add the point of view of some research that has been done since.
In essence, new calculations show that NCS (natural climate solutions: a combination of land management, forestation, etc):
...can provide over
one-third of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed between now
and 2030 to ...
7
One of the consequences that I find more fascinating with the increased CO2 problem is the changes that affect specific components of the environment. One example that I like is the effect on poison ivy. Researchers at Duke University (Mohan et al., 2006), as part of their Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiment, reported a large change in poison ivy ...
7
If you increase CO2 concentration and keep all other parameters at there current level, then biomass production should go up. The reason is simply that CO2 is one of the building blocks biomass is made of in photosynthesis.
In the real world it's trickier than that of course. Here you have to take into account how natural cycles will be affected by ...
7
The difference is that a carbon sink accumulates carbon, whereas a carbon reservoir has accumulated carbon.
That is to say:
A carbon sink is an ongoing process which is increasing the amount of carbon stored in it.
Whereas although a carbon reservoir might exchange individual carbon-based molecules with other parts of the carbon cycle, as much will go out ...
7
Diamond isn't made of organic C at all. Organic matter would rather become oil, gas, coal or dissolve entirely.
C itself isn't very common in earth's mantle, but subducted eclogites and peridotites can lead to the needed C-accumulation.
But also meteorite impacts can lead to the genesis of so called micro-diamonds due to the very short lasting but extreme ...
7
The Carboniferous was when the growth of woody plants took off. Non-plant life had not yet evolved the ability to consume lignins, the key chemical components that makes woody plants "woody". Lignins are rather hard to decompose. Despite high volcanic activity, carbon dioxide levels fell by a factor of over four during the Carboniferous, from over sixteen ...
6
This is a very complex issue, and therefore I'm not entirely convinced I am qualified to answer that, considering how little I understand chemistry, but I'll give it a try.
The Flux of CO2 can be expressed as follows (see e. g. Wanninkhof et al. 2009):
$$F = kK_0(p_{\mathrm{CO}_2sea} - p_{\mathrm{CO}_2air})$$
By convention a negative $F$ means a flux from ...
6
An important role of vegetation in carbon sequestration is related to what happens belowground. Plant roots comprise a signficant portion of vegetative biomass and remain in the soil even when a plant dies or is harvested. Plants also exude organic carbon through their roots into the subsurface, in part serving a symbiotic purpose with microorganisms. The ...
6
Instead of using sodium bicarbonate why not use limestone instead? Limestone is already used on an industrial scale to neutralise acids and acidic solutions. Also, sodium bicarbonate needs to be manufactured, whereas limestone just needs to be dug up. The manufacturing of sodium bicarbonate would unnecessarily use energy and potentially create more carbon ...
6
Photosynthesis has not stopped. It happens all the time, splitting water and carbon dioxide, and producing oxygen and carbohydrates. Likewise, organic matter rots and decomposes all the time, requiring oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. The Keeling curve actually illustrates this quite nicely: most of the land mass where this happens lies in the north, and ...
6
If we consider only the climatic impacts of Arctic coastal erosion, there are still two sides of the question of how relevant is Arctic coastal erosion of permafrost.
The first side is how big is its current role as a ${CO}_2$ source, and the second is how much of risk it posses for future climate change.
It term of current contribution the answers is that ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
