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Over the last several years researchers have said that the Amazon is on the verge of transforming from a crucial storehouse for heat-trapping gasses to a source of them, a dangerous shift that could destabilize the atmosphere of the planet.
Now, after years of painstaking and inventive research, they have definitively measured that shift.
In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. They found that the massive continental-size swath of tropical forest is releasing more carbon dioxide than it accumulates or stores, thanks to deforestation and fires.
“There is no doubt that the Amazon is a source,” said Luciana Gatti, the lead author of the study.
Journal Reference:
Luciana V. Gatti, Luana S. Basso, John B. Miller, et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18 2021, @09:43PM
C'mon now, you say that like it's a bug rather than a feature.
As for the carbon-capture plants, the one thing missing from the article you linked is any mention of the power required to operate the plant, and what percentage of the plant's capability is spend canceling the increased carbon from generating that power.
The engineer in me says it doesn't much matter (as long as it's less than 100%), since an ongoing power sink that can be increased or decreased at will is beneficial on its own -- that lets us scale up efficient base generation and solar/wind, and use an overbuilt array of carbon plants as virtual storage, spinning them up during power surpluses, and down during deficits, so long as the longterm average carbon extraction is what it needs to be.
But the student of reality says any such scheme will eventually end up with someone figuring out how to get away with running the carbon plants less and less to make up for inadequate generation.
If you're serious about it, you probably need a regulatory structure where a company cannot sell electricity from a carbon-emitting power plant unless they are simultaneously operating carbon plants extracting the power plant's carbon output (with a multiplier to account for untracked carbon emissions and/or reversing historical emissions). If one of your carbon plants shut down, and you can't spin up another to compensate, you have to reduce your power generation proportionally and take it up the wallet until you fix it.