Sentences with phrase «than carbon sink»

Not exact matches

The WHRC said that widespread deforestation, degradation and disturbance had caused forests to become a «source» of carbon rather than a net carbon «sink.»

Sinks are those zones that take in more carbon than they emit, effectively storing the carbon and preventing it from contributing to global warming.

Now, new research shows that one of the planet's largest and most important carbon sinks, the forests of northern Eurasia, may be pulling in carbon at a slower rate than in the past.

«Our four - year study suggests that AMP grazing can potentially offset greenhouse gas emissions, and the finishing phase of beef production could be a net carbon sink, with carbon levels staying in the green rather than in the red.»

Researchers from the United Kingdom and Brazil also said the pair of droughts have raised concerns that the forest could be approaching a point where it ceases to be a carbon «sink,» absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it produces, and flips to a carbon source.

«The amount of carbon that you can sink into the Southern Ocean is much less than I expected.»

Sugar cane provide a better carbon sink than pasture, leading to a net decrease in emissions.

The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that soil, as a sink for carbon dioxide, provides a larger reservoir than either vegetation or the atmosphere, calling its sequestration capabilities «unparalleled.»

The approach ranked as the study's least viable strategy, in part because less than a quarter of the algae could be expected to eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean, which would be the only way that carbon would be sequestered for a long period of time.

«For every ton of CO2 emitted [into] the atmosphere, the natural sinks are removing less carbon than before,» says biologist Josep «Pep» Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project — an Australia — based research consortium devoted to analyzing the pollution behind global warming.

«It essentially means that, through multiple means, in a world with mixotrophs, more organic carbon is sinking into the deep ocean than in a world without mixotrophs,» Follows says.

But for more than 20 years, experts have warned that the strength of this carbon «sink» is declining and will level off around mid-century.

That deep water is not only rich in nutrients, it also has relatively high concentrations of carbon dioxide, both because it is cold (cold water can absorb and hold more carbon dioxide than warm water) and because the decomposition of organic matter that sinks into the depths releases carbon dioxide.

Deploying new sensors that drift with sometimes strong currents (allowing better measurement of marine snow than sensors placed on the ocean floor or tethered to the surface), the team sampled the flora and fauna and measured the amount of falling carbon material captured to assess the role of the ocean as a true carbon sink.

The findings suggest that overestimates of China's emissions during this period may be larger than China's estimated total forest sink — a natural carbon store — in 1990 - 2007 (2.66 gigatonnes of carbon) or China's land carbon sink in 2000 - 2009 (2.6 gigatonnes of carbon).

Over recent decades the remaining Amazon forest has acted as a vast «carbon sink» — absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases — helping to put a brake on the rate of climate change.

The latest IPCC report concludes that the terrestrial biosphere will become a source rather than a sink of carbon before the end of the century.

Small, slow - sinking organic particles may play a bigger role than previously thought in the transport of carbon below the surface ocean.

«And, what puzzles researchers working on the biological carbon pump: it is higher than that of non-calcifying phytoplankton and marine snow, the main sinking particles and organic carbon sources to the ocean interior».

Another frustrating misstatement in Flannery's book is the suggestion that young forests are better carbon sinks than old forests, which misses the relaitvley larger carbon pool (both above and below ground) associated with older forests.

A more sound approach would recognize that (1) converting old forest to young forests releases significant amounts of carbon (both above and below ground), (2) young forests are only good carbon sinks if they are allowed to grow and hold onto the carbon for centuries, yet there are too few economic incentives for doing so, and (2) the fraction of carbon that is put into long - term storage after logging is very small, i.e. old forests are better at storing carbon than our disposable culture.

If an element takes up more carbon than it emits, it is known as a «carbon sink» and it acts to slow the pace of warming.

«We're trying to ensure that we have healthy, resilient forests that are net sinks of carbon so that they're storing more carbon than they're releasing,» said Russ Henly, a California Natural Resources Agency official who helped draft the plan.

Today, environmentalists tend to describe forests as little more than «carbon sinks,» sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

No wonder the carbon sinks are saturating faster than we thought (see here)-- unmodeled impacts of climate change are destroying them:

Vigorous convective mixing in the deep tropics also dilutes changes in near - surface CO2 much more than at higher latitudes, so low - altitude sampling contains relatively less information about carbon sources and sinks.

Does the «business as usual» referred to here include the recent findings about substantially faster growth in CO2 emissions than predicted, saturation of carbon sinks, and arctic ice melting?

Also, dealing with the forests as a «carbon sink,» deforestation and other factors may have rendered trees as a net carbon emitter, rather than a sink.

Funny how difficult it is for him and his fellow denialati to look at 1) where that carbon came from 2) its isotopic composition 3) the fact that it takes a while for permafrost to melt and oceans to become a source rather than a sink 4) the fact that humans are producing about 2x as much carbon as is going into the atmosphere 5) the remaining CO2 is acidifying the oceans

A more sound approach would recognize that (1) converting old forest to young forests releases significant amounts of carbon (both above and below ground), (2) young forests are only good carbon sinks if they are allowed to grow and hold onto the carbon for centuries, yet there are too few economic incentives for doing so, and (2) the fraction of carbon that is put into long - term storage after logging is very small, i.e. old forests are better at storing carbon than our disposable culture.

In fact the soil sink capacity is so huge it is more than all the biomass and all the atmospheric carbon worldwide combined!

Soil is a vast carbon sink, containing more carbon than all terrestrial vegetation and the atmosphere combined.

Not only are they one of the most important carbon sinks, storing more carbon than both the atmosphere and the world's oil reserves, they also constantly remove carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, which converts atmospheric carbon to organic matter.

Less well known is the immense potential of soils to act as vast carbon sinks, with the ability to «naturally turn over about 10 times more greenhouse gas on a global scale than the burning of fossil fuels.»

Those three facts suggest that most if not all of the observed increase in CO2 is natural unless it can be shown that for some reason warming oceans can nevertheless act as a carbon sink rather than a carbon source.

After incorporating these «indirect emission» effects from changes in land use, often into areas valuable as carbon sinks, the analysis found that biofuels produced from vegetable oils are likely to be worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

«Cutting trees for fuel is antithetical to the important role that forests play as a sink for CO2 that might otherwise accumulate in the atmosphere,» Schlesinger writes in an article published yesterday in the journal Science, adding later that carbon neutrality «is only achieved» if harvested forests are allowed to regrow more biomass than was lost.

Some regions may even shift from being a carbon sink to being an atmospheric carbon dioxide source, 50,51,52 though large uncertainties exist, such as whether projected disturbances to forests will be chronic or episodic.31 Midwest forests are more resilient to forest carbon losses than most western forests because of relatively high moisture availability, greater nitrogen deposition (which tends to act as a fertilizer), and lower wildfire risk.50, 51,53

Although global forests currently capture and store more carbon each year than they emit, 46 the ability of forests to act as large, global carbon absorbers («sinks») may be reduced by projected increased disturbances from insect outbreaks, 47 forest fire, 48 and drought, 49 leading to increases in tree mortality and carbon emissions.

Using the NDVI, one team this year reported that «over the last few decades of the 20th century, terrestrial ecosystems acted as net carbon sinks,» i.e., they absorbed more carbon than they were emitting, and «net greening was reported in all biomes,» though the effect had slowed down in recent years.

If wildfire trends continue, at least initially, this biomass burning will result in carbon release, suggesting that the forests of the western United States may become a source of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than a sink, even under a relatively modest temperature - increase scenario.

They report that stopping deforestation and allowing young secondary forests to grow back could establish a «forest sink» — an area that absorbs carbon dioxide rather than releasing it into the atmosphere — which by 2100 could grow by over 100 billion metric tons of carbon, about ten times the current annual rate of global fossil fuel emissions.

«If droughts become more frequent, as expected, the time between droughts may become shorter than drought recovery time, leading to permanently damaged ecosystems and widespread degradation of the land carbon sink.»

While it may be critical to sequester ocean carbon at depths greater than 1000 meters, this might prove extremely difficult given very high rates of respiration of particulate matter and remineralization by bacteria, resulting in only 1 - 10 % of sinking particulates reaching depths below 1000 meters.

Meantime the CO2 hypothesis has no predictive power either; likely less so than all the others; the main problem being that it is only a heating mechanism: To cause a cooling event you need a massive carbon sink to appear out of nowhere.

The research challenges the long - held belief that forests act as «carbon sinks» by storing more carbon than they emit due to natural processes and human activity.

So far, the Arctic is considered a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more CO2 than it emits on an annual basis, thanks mainly to the vegetation that grows in the summer.

This decision defined small - scale afforestation or reforestation project activities as those that are expected to result in net anthropogenic GHG removals by sinks of less than 8 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

«Given our findings, the Arctic is an even smaller carbon sink than we thought since during some years nearly half of the summer uptake of CO2 is offset with these spring emissions,» Raz - Yaseef said.

The natural fluxes of carbon are some 24 times the human flux and both natural sinks and sources vary over less than a geological age.