Plants temporarily halted the acceleration of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, new research suggests.
From 2002 through 2014, CO2 levels measured over the oceans climbed from around 372 parts per million to 397 parts per million. But the average rate of that rise remained steady despite increasing carbon emissions from human activities, researchers report online November 8 in Nature Communications. After pouring over climate measurements and simulations, the researchers attribute this steadying to changes in the relative amount of CO2 absorbed and released by plants.
The work is the first to clearly demonstrate that plants can affect the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 over long time periods, says study coauthor Trevor Keenan, an earth systems scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Still, human emissions remain the dominant driver of CO2 levels, he says. "If we keep emitting as much as we are, and what we emit keeps going up, then it won't matter very much what the plants do."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @10:09AM
Let's plant trees, people. Let's plant grasses and bushes. Reforest the Sahara, and billions of plants will work round the clock to clean our air. All we need are a few nuke plants to generate electricity to purify seawater, then pump that seawater into the interior of the continent.
As plant biologist, the best solution I have heard so far is digging trenches: https://justdiggit.org/ [justdiggit.org]
The solution is low cost, low maintenance, uses natural sources (sun and wind for energy and hooks into the earths water cycle) and nature can heal itself.