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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:19PM
Bamboo, hemp, uhhhh - what's that other plant they make paper from - dang it, there's a plantation not far from me, and I can't remember what the plant is. It's very much like bamboo.
Not papyrus, I believe that requires a very wet environment, but that would work if we pumped enough water into the desert. It's very much like bamboo.
Anything green growing on the Saharan desert would be good for the absorption of carbon. Anything at all, even lichens and mosses. The bigger and denser the better, so we would like trees, but even grasses are good. All they need is water, and some seed.
(just a note that bamboo is a grass, not sure that everyone here knows that)
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