The Global Carbon Cycle (Book Review)
- Title :- The Global Carbon Cycle.
By :- David Archer
Published :- Princeton University Press – paperback, USA 2010 (200 pages)
Outline :- Easy to read scientific review of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. Looks objectively at the different aspects of the earth’s cycle, including re-adsorption into soil, plants and ocean. Looks at the historic evidence from ice cores etc to conclude today’s rise in CO2 may have a significant contribution from man, but the rise in CO2 has also happened just as radically before man.
Some interesting excerpts;
- “The carbon cycle today is helping out by adsorbing about half our CO2 emissions into the oceans and land surface.
- Sulphide deposits in coal also tend to be rich in mercury, making coal combustion the leading source of mercury in the environment.
- The rate of degassing CO2 from the earth is likely to vary throughout time. About half of the CO2 degassing today is in mid ocean ridge vent fluids.
- The oxygen homeostat is not well understood as the weathering CO2 thermostat in that there are ideas but no detailed models for oxygen yet.
- The glacial world was a dustier place than the interglacial world because of the aridity and higher wind speeds of the glacial climate.
- The end of the last ice age was passaged by rising temperatures in Antartica, followed shortly thereafter by a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
- Every year the ocean takes up about 2 Gton of C, accounting for about one third of the uptake of human release carbon by the natural world.
- The concentration of methane is about double (1.6ppm) what it was in 1750 (0.7ppm), a larger relative increase that for CO2. ..Molecule for molecule, methane is about fourty times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas…. Rice farming is a significant artificial source of methane to the atmosphere, other sources are natural wet lands, and digestion from cows and grubs etc.