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The Missing Carbon

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As far as I know, I was the first person to mention that terrestrial forests, and not the oceans, generate the great bulk (about 75%) of the free oxygen in our atmosphere, and consequently, absorb an equal amount of carbon dioxide - in a 1988 submission titled "The BIG Surprise", to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Original Abstracts:

MURKY WATER

(Quote:) "Power plants, cars and burning forests emit carbon dioxide; oceans absorb it. The long accepted wisdom on global warming is that the boundless depths covering nearly three quarters of the world's surface buffer the greenhouse effect. Climatic shifts and sea-level changes will occur - but slowly.

This picture is probably wrong. New data have led investigators to conclude that the oceans consume far less CO2 than previously thought and thus that land-bound sinks must be consuming more. The results (of their studies) were surprising: the ocean apparently absorbs a most a billion tons of carbon, not two or three ... and where CO2 in water is high, the transfer may even go in reverse (into the atmosphere). Terrestrial sinks must be taking up significantly more carbon than was once believed, but exactly which sinks are performing such yeoman service is as yet a mystery." Scientific American, May 1990.

My comments: That the world's oceans generate almost all of the free oxygen in our biosphere was a totally unfounded assumption; no one had ever actually done the figures. And this groundless assumption has then become the "academic wisdom" taught to all following generations of scientists. Unfortunately, and as utterly wrong as it is, this erroneous assumption is still deeply ingrained in academia. Consequently, the chief focus is still on carbon dioxide absorption, rather than on free oxygen generation. And although this is practically the same thing, it does not alert us to the far more cataclysmic reality that the total (over and above the oxygen lock-up in carbon dioxide) free oxygen content of our biosphere has been declining steadily since 1989 (at least). See OXYGEN DECLINE in these pages.

TRACKING THE MISSING CARBON

(Quote) "One of the biggest uncertainties about the greenhouse effect is the mystery of the 'missing carbon". Fossil-fuel burning adds about six billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere each year in the form of carbon dioxide, and deforestation and topsoil erosion may add three billion tons more. Yet the amount of extra carbon that appears in the atmosphere each year is only 3.5 billion tons. Another 1.5 billion tons dissolve in the ocean. The remaining 4 billion tons vanish without a trace.

Some researchers think that trees may be a missing piece of the puzzle. They cite research showing that forests, " .... could soak up far more carbon than previously predicted".

Last year Peter P. Tans, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and his colleagues concluded on the basis of computer models that two or three billion tons of carbon dioxide are disappearing into an unknown terrestrial sink that lies in northern temperate latitudes. (Tans commented); "Great, nature is helping us here - we might be able to delay climatic change by growing forests on a large scale".Scientific American, April 1991.

RESPIRATION AS THE MAIN DETERMINANT OF CARBON BALANCE IN EUROPEAN FORESTS

Here we present data of net ecosystem carbon exchange, collected between 1996 and 1998 from 15 European forests, which confirm that many European forest ecosystems act as carbon sinks. The annual carbon balances range from an uptake of 6.6 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year to a release of nearly 1 t C ha -1 yr-1, with a large variability between forests. The data show a significant increase of carbon uptake with decreasing latitude, whereas the gross primary production seems to be largely independent of latitude. Our observations indicate that, in general, ecosystem respiration determines net ecosystem carbon exchange.
R. VALENTINI, G. MATTEUCCI, A. J. DOLMAN, E.-D. SCHULZE, C. REBMANN, E. J. MOORS, A. GRANIER, P. GROSS, N. O. JENSEN, K. PILEGAARD, A. LINDROTH, A. GRELLE, C. BERNHOFER, T. GRÜNWALD, M. AUBINET, R. CEULEMANS, A. S. KOWALSKI, T. VESALA, Ü. RANNIK, P. BERBIGIER, D. LOUSTAU, J. GU & Eth MUNDSSON, H. THORGEIRSSON, A. IBROM, K. MORGENSTERN, R. CLEMENT, J. MONCRIEFF, L. MONTAGNANI, S. MINERBI & P. G. JARVIS - "Nature" April 20. 2000 (www.nature.com).

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