Forest and Grassland Carbon in North AmericaChris Swanston
U.S. Forest Service
Address some key questions:
... boring, but useful ...
Common units of carbon stocks...
... boring, but useful ...
Common units of carbon stocks...
Common units of carbon fluxes...
... boring, but useful ...
Common units of carbon stocks...
Common units of carbon fluxes...
Common units of carbon density...
...by watching the following presentations in this series
On the global carbon stocks slide the annual fossil fuel emissions pool looks small relative to the others. Why is that important and how is that pool growing relative to others?
Annual fossil fuel emissions are growing much faster than the other pools. It is important because that pool essentially comes from outside of the system in addition to the carbon cycle. There are natural additions from that pool into the carbon cycle but they are on the order of .1 gigatons a year. Now we are adding 7.7 gigatons of carbon per year. Even though there are some land and ocean sinks there is still an annual net increase of 4 gigatons every year and that is why we are seeing the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rising in the atmosphere.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the interaction between carbon in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere?
What we see in that surface component of the ocean acts in a much larger way with the atmosphere. In general we have about 92 gigatons of carbon coming into the ocean and only about 90 coming back which is approximately a 2.5 gigaton net sequestration of carbon in the ocean. Much of that is converted to bicarbonate once dissolved into the ocean. Because of the way it interacts chemically in the ocean, it causes acidification which has a deleterious effect on many different forms of life in the ocean. So as we increase the carbon dioxide the atmosphere it increases the pressure of moving that particular compound into the ocean. Acidification will increase for some time just as carbon dioxide is expected to increase for some time.
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http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/contents.html (Accessed June 1, 2011).
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http://www.carbon-biodiversity.net/GlobalScale/Map (Accessed June 1, 2011)
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