Stop Panicking Over Fossil Fuels: There Is A Ton of Good News Out There!

One of our readers out there sent me a great story yesterday from an outfit called the Good News Network. Titled “Climate Models Need an Upgrade: Plants Absorb 31% More Carbon Than Previously Thought,” it’s all about CO2 and the way plants absorb the stuff.

It turns out they are incredible CO2 sponges and absorb almost a third more than anyone knew:

Plants around the world absorb 37 billion more metric tons of carbon than was previously thought, a new study has demonstrated.

It means every tree planted to try and prevexnt the worst of climate change goes 31% farther than earlier models on Earth carbon systems have calucated, and it’s believed the research will help contribute to more accurate predictions in the future as the climate changes.

The Earth has several major carbon systems that are well understood. There is a carbon system between the atmophsere and the oceans, and another between the atmosphere and the vegebiome. This is designated Terrestrial Gross Primary Production, or GPP.

GPP is typically measured by petatons per year. One petaton is 1 billion metric tons, and since the 1980s it’s been believed that GPP is around 120 per year.

A team of researchers Cornell University, with support from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, altered two key approaches to estimate GPP, which provided them with the updated figure.

The first is high-resolution data from environmental monitoring towers instead of satellite observations which can be interefered with by cloud cover, especially in the humid and rainy tropics. The second was measuring photosynthesis in plants by tracing the path of the molecule carbonyl sulfide, or OCS.

OCS, like carbon dioxide, enters the leaf tissue and is moved into chloroplasts, the engines where photosynthesis occurs. However, unlike CO2, OCS is easier to track and measure.

The team used plant data from a variety of sources to get a picture of how effeciently different genera of plants conduct photosynthesis while tracking OCS. One of the sources was the LeafWeb database at Oak Ridge Labs. The database contains photosynthesis observations from scientists all around the world.

“Figuring out how much CO2 plants fix each year is a conundrum that scientists have been working on for a while,” said Lianhong Gu, co-author and staff scientist in ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division.

“The original estimate of 120 petagrams per year was established in the 1980s, and it stuck as we tried to figure out a new approach. It’s important that we get a good handle on global GPP since that initial land carbon uptake affects the rest of our representations of Earth’s carbon cycle.”

“We have to make sure the fundamental processes in the carbon cycle are properly represented in our larger-scale models,” Gu added. “For those Earth-scale simulations to work well, they need to represent the best understanding of the processes at work. This work represents a major step forward in terms of providing a definitive number.”

The implications of this are gargantuan, of course. They mean absolutely nothing about all the climate predictions spun by climate modelers is reliable. We simply don’t know enough to make such hyped up predictions.

But, there’s more good news on methane from another story by the same news source:

A surprise discovery from the University of Birmingham shows that we may be significantly underestimating the potential of trees to regulate the variables of climate change.

That’s because they found microbes living inside trees’ bark absorb the greenhouse gas methane about as significantly as microbes living in the soil.

It’s long been thought that soil is the only effective terrestrial methane sink, as certain microorganisms use methane as a food source, but similar creatures live under a tree’s layer of bark, meaning that not only do our woody cousins withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, but also remove methane as well, about as effectively or perhaps more so than soil.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas for the few short years it exists in the atmosphere before degrading.

Professor Vincent Gauci of U. Birmingham led the study, published in the journal Nature.

Then, there’s this:

Scientists in the Netherlands have shown quite convincingly that the issue of plastic pollution in our oceans is far smaller than anyone believed.

Their research highlights a variety of good news tidbits: the first one being that abstract scientific modeling can be more than just wrong, but completely wrong, and the second is that organizations pulling trash out of the oceans and rivers today aren’t simply mowing a golf course with nail clippers: they’re making a significant difference to these ecosystems.

According to the Netherlands Times reporting on the study, estimates for how much plastic has made it into the oceans over the last 20 years range from 50 million tons to 300 million tons, but the actual amount is likely somewhere around 3.2 million tons.

Finally, there’s good news on Antarctica, too, from this story at the Daily Skeptic:

Sea ice around Antarctica has “slowly increased” since the start of continuous satellite recordings in 1979 with any changes caused by natural climate variation. In a paper published earlier this year, four environmental scientists further state that any sign that humans are responsible for any change is “inconclusive”. Not of course for mainstream media that have been crying wolf about the sea ice in Antarctica for decades to promote the Net Zero fantasy. Last year there was a reduced level of winter sea ice and this caused the Financial Times Science Editor Clive Cookson to exclaim that the entire area “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect climate around the world”.

Over the satellite record, the scientists note there was a “prolonged and gradual” expansion of sea ice to around 2014 followed by a short period of sudden decline from 2014-19. Growth was then resumed, although there was a temporary downturn around 2022. These variations, which can also be observed before 1979, were caused by a number of natural atmospheric and oceanic factors. All of this is known of course, with the EU weather service Copernicus admitting recently that sea ice extent as a whole “shows large year-to-year variability and no clear long-term trend since 1979”. At the other end of the Earth, Copernicus correctly states that the cyclical decline in Arctic sea ice “has leveled off since 2007”.

How much good news can we take? So much winning!

#ClimateChange #CO2 #Trees #Methane #TreeBark #Ice #Antarctica