Missing carbon mystery: Case solved?

[Henk op xp]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0708/full/climate.2007.35.html

"
Nature Reports Climate Change
doi:10.1038/climate.2007.35


Missing carbon mystery: Case solved?

Jane Burgermeister

*Scientists claim to have located the 'missing carbon sink' in tropical 
forests that are absorbing around one billion tonnes more carbon than 
previously thought. Jane Burgermeister investigates.*

They looked for it here and they looked for it there, but the carbon had 
vanished into thin air. So it seemed in the case of the 'missing carbon 
sink', a billion tonnes of human-generated carbon assumed to be absorbed 
by northern forests, but unaccounted for in field studies. Scientists 
now say they have located the missing carbon in tropical forests that 
are removing much higher quantities of carbon dioxide from the 
atmosphere than realized.

Missing carbon mystery: Case solved?

Tropical forests could be absorbing as much as one billion tonnes more 
carbon than previously realized.


Of the 8 billion tonnes of carbon that human activity produces each year 
— 6.4 from fossil-fuel emissions, and 1.6 from deforestation, mainly in 
the tropics^1 
<http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0708/full/climate.2007.35.html#B1> — 
on average, 3.2 billion tonnes remain in the atmosphere, 2.2 billion 
tonnes are stored in the oceans and 2.6 billion tonnes are sucked up by 
land-based carbon sinks, mainly forests. Carbon-uptake models predict 
that as much as 2.4 billion tonnes of this carbon ends up in northern 
mid- to high-latitude forests. But scientists searching for it on the 
ground — measuring trees and carbon exchanges between the vegetation and 
the atmosphere — have only been able to account for about 0.7 billion 
tonnes there^2 
<http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0708/full/climate.2007.35.html#B2> .
...
"

Henk Elegeert

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