Across natural ecosystems around the globe plant foliage is holding less nitrogen. That is the finding of a new study. “According to the researchers, plants outside of agricultural settings now contain 9 percent less nitrogen than they did in 1980…..elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have accelerated plant photosynthesis, leading to the production of more vegetable matter even as the amount of nitrogen available to their roots remains constant.” The Abstract of the study concludes with this sentence: “These declines will limit future terrestrial carbon uptake and increase nutritional stress for herbivores.” The loss of carbon uptake would imply a weakening of the sink that now absorbs about 25% of our current emissions growth.
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Peatland, another important carbon sink, is suffering excessive degradation. In this case the sink itself could be transformed into an extraordinary new source of carbon emissions if we do not take care to preserve it properly and global warming continues. According to the author of this study, “Global peatlands cover only about 3 percent of global land area, but hold around 30 percent of the earth’s soil organic carbon……Peatlands act like a ‘terrestrial ocean’ because of their sequestering carbon, but will this large amount of peat carbon be released under a warmer climate, causing further warming?” Just one small basin in the Peruvian Amazon that was studied could lose up to 500 million tons of carbon by the end of this century. https://phys.org/news/2018-11-major-natural-carbon-source.html
“Blue carbon” ecosystems, based on shallow water rather than land, have great potential for capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Today they are being lost at an alarming rate, for reasons that should not be difficult to bring under control. When properly protected, or even replanted, this type of vegetation is capable of rapid and highly productive growth. “Globally, blue carbon ecosystems are smaller in extent than terrestrial ecosystems, but they have the potential to sequester ten times more carbon per area unit than land systems, and are twice as effective at storing carbon in soil and biomass.” Cohesive national policies need to be implemented. (Climate Code Red)
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What are temperatures like inside the ice of high mountain glaciers? A team of researchers wanted to find out, so they drilled a number of cores into the world’s highest glacier on Mount Everest. The result “revealed a minimum ice temperature of only −3.3 °C, with even the coldest ice being a full 2 °C warmer than the mean annual air temperature…..’Warm’ ice is particularly vulnerable to climate change because even small increases in temperature can trigger melting…..the Khumbu Glacier’s vulnerability may have serious consequences for the lifespan and amount of meltwater runoff in the coming decades and it will be important to determine if other glaciers in the region have similar internal characteristics to Khumbu.” Several billion people who live in Southeast Asia should be interested. https://phys.org/news/2018-11-ice-world-highest-glacier.html?
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Why do air temperatures in the Arctic warm up so much more than the global mean? This is a question that has been answered through many different hypotheses, yet never fully resolved, starting from the assumption that increased greenhouse gas cover is about the same everywhere. Now a research group using complex computer models has come up with a new answer, giving much reduced importance to things like incoming heat transport from the tropics and even the local effect of reduced albedo because of lessened ice or snow cover. Rather, they have found that the vertical air column above the Arctic has higher stability than that over lower latitudes, making it more difficult for any longwave energy released from the surface to move rapidly to the top of the atmosphere, as tropical “thermals” regularly do, where it can then be released to space. That would effectively magnify the greenhouse effect in the Arctic by sort of physically compressing it. Interesting.
Carl