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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @10:26AM
From one point of view, carbon trapped in plant material It is caught in sort of a juggling cycle: It eventually comes out of it.
However, from another point of view, juggling cycle is actually storing the number of juggled objects, while it lasts.
The trouble would arise if cycle dynamic changes because of some independent variable in it changes in such direction that cycle starts to shrink.
Of course I concur that biosphere is helping, but not nearly enough to keep status quo.
Perhaps more research is needed to understand is it only a latency, or an actual plateau of its absorbing capacity?