Carbon Sequestration

The Weekly Watch

Submitted by Lookout on Sun, 03/17/2019 - 7:59am

Here Comes the Sun
or
Come on Baby Light My Fire

The wheel of the year turns to spring this week. There will be more sunlight...longer days... here in the Northern hemisphere. Light is the key to fixing carbon...through photosynthesis. Plants taking CO2 and building it into sugars and other compounds. When we eat plants we burn them back into CO2 and H2O. This balance of photosynthesis and respiration maintains the carbon cycle. For most of human history we have burnt wood as our primary fuel. Trees will regrow and recapture atmospheric carbon. However over the last century we converted to fossil fuels over plant based renewable energy sources. That (and population growth) is what put us on the path of rapid climate collapse.

carbon_cycle.jpg

This diagram of the fast carbon cycle shows the movement of carbon between land, atmosphere, and oceans. Yellow numbers are natural fluxes, and red are human contributions in gigatons of carbon per year. White numbers indicate stored carbon.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle

Hot Air

Submitted by magiamma on Thu, 10/25/2018 - 5:00am

Something to keep in mind… "If all of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to go, we are talking about 72, perhaps even 80 meters (262 ft) of global sea level rise." Paul Beckwith

Melting glacier in China

The loud crack rang out from the fog above the Baishui No. 1 Glacier as a stone shard careened down the ice, flying past Chen Yanjun as he operated a GPS device.
...
Millions of people each year are drawn to Baishui’s frosty beauty on the southeastern edge of the Third Pole __ a region in Central Asia with the world’s third-largest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland that’s roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.

Third Pole glaciers are vital to billions of people from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Asia’s 10 largest rivers __ including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, and Ganges __ are fed by seasonal melting.
...
The glacier has lost 60 per cent of its mass and shrunk 250 metres (820 feet) since 1982, according to a 2018 report in the Journal of Geophysical Research.”