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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 Sunday November 13 2016, @04:50PM
All we need are a few nuke plants to generate electricity to purify seawater, then pump that seawater into the interior of the continent.
Are you 10? Do the damn calculation first before making shit up. Or just read up about Sahara. It's been doing nothing but expanding over the last 2000 years.
It would go a long way if Brazil wasn't about to make 2nd Sahara in South America through deforestation (yes, trees are what causes rain the the rain forest) but whatever.
Of course, the next alarmist prediction would be the sinking of Africa, due to all the weight of the added vegetation . . .
Oh, sorry, just an idiot. And I thought you were just immature.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:30PM
Apparently, you're not even ten years old. The Sahara is almost all man made. We did that. We cut the trees down, we used extremely poor farming practices, we over grazed the land with sheeps and goats. Man did all of that. Just as man has begun to destroy the desert in Arizona with crap farming practices. Arizona is a desert, but it is a very fertile land. Add a bit of water, and anything grows.
We saw how fertile the land was, and we couldn't wait to start cutting it open with plows. What moisture was trapped in the soil by the plant covering rapidly evaporated, and the soil pretty much died. A similar story happened in Washington and Oregon, but the farming practes were better, so the soil didn't die. (for those who don't know it, that area east of the mountains is indeed a desert)
Now - what's wrong with the nuclear plants? Build ten or twenty around the continent, all dedicated to extracting fresh water from seawater. Pump that water into the interior, where it is most needed. The Sahara won't disappear in ten or a hundred years, but we can most certainly stop it expanding.
What does ANY of that have to with your maturity level?
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