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Drawing down atmospheric carbon
Drawing down atmospheric carbon
There are two ways of addressing rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon; reduce the amount of carbon emissions or increase the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Most of our efforts have been focused on reducing emissions. I’d like to shift the conversation to drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The picture above was taken in the corn field near my home showing the hard and cracked soil in this field. The picture below was taken in my garden earlier this spring. I simply turned over a shovel of soil and you can see worms, roots, and soil structure all indicating a healthy soil. These pictures should make clear the differences between the degraded conventional farmland and healthy organic rich soil. My garden soil contains about 9% organic matter, which is refreshed each year with mulch used to suppress weeds and feed the soil. Most Midwestern farmland has been degraded and contains a small fraction of the organic matter it had when it was first farmed.
In our county we often see a decrease in organic matter from 5% to less than 1%. The soil in the farm field is little but dust particles. The surface cracks are an indication of what happens when the soil loses organic matter. It dries out and the surface hardens. This farm soil has no soil structure because it has lost it’s thriving microbial life, the bottom of the food chain. Without worms and fungi there is nothing working to form and hold opens pores, the soil surface becomes a hardened crusted surface soon after plowing and planting.
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Growing threat to Amazon’s crucial carbon sink
Growing threat to Amazon’s crucial carbon sink
Massive new study shows that pressures on the Amazon rainforest mean it can no longer be relied on to soak up more CO2 from the atmosphere than it puts out.
LONDON, 19 March, 2015 − The Amazon rainforest, for so long one of the vital “green lungs” of the planet, is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, according to new research.
Two decades ago, the forest drew down a peak of two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year from the atmosphere. Now, according to a massive new study in Nature journal by more than 90 scientists, the rate of withdrawal has fallen to around half that total.
Fossil fuel emissions from Latin American countries are now running at more than a billion tonnes of CO2. So the region is putting more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than it is taking out.
The finding is ominous. The Amazon rainforest has always been a big item in the climate modellers’ carbon budget − the calculation of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels burned, set against the natural absorption of the same trace gases by the biosphere.
Unique research
The implication now is that the forest is no longer a carbon “sink” that that can be relied upon to take up a predictable proportion of fossil fuel emissions.
The conclusion is the outcome of a unique international research network’s 30-year study of 189,000 individual trees in 321 plots of forest dotted across six million square kilometres in eight South American countries. And it has revealed a huge surge in the rate of tree deaths across the Amazon basin.
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