Mopping Up the CO2 Deluge
- added July 6, 2008
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- Chique
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The earth will little note nor long remember what we do to it--at least over the course of its own grand time scale rather than our brief, urgent one. Once we stop burning fossil fuels, it could take as long as 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide we've been pouring into the atmosphere to be gone. Most of it will have settled into the ocean, on its way to becoming new limestone beds on the seafloor; the rest will have been absorbed by the land, some of it eventually forming new deposits of coal. Even now, the water and soil are acting like great sponges, soaking up at least some of the carbon our industrial species emits every day and slowing--if not preventing--the climate-changing damage we're doing to our world.
That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough.
That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough.
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