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  • From: "robscott@freeshell.org" <robscott@freeshell.org>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Global Carbon Budget and the "trees as lungs" metaphor
  • Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 06:42:18 +0000 (UTC)


GLOBAL CARBON BUDGET
These numbers are multiplied by 10^15 grams for the total Carbon on Earth. That is, you multiply the numbers below times 1,000,000,000,000,000 to get the number of grams of carbon on earth in each sink and annual flux rates.

major carbon "sinks"
oceans 38,000
soils 1,500
atmosphere 750
terrestrial plants 560

carbon "fluxes" (per year)
sequestration by plants +120
respired by plants -60
respired by soils -60

into oceans +92
out of oceans -90

increase in atmosphere +3.2
fossil fuel emissions -6
destruction of vegetation -0.9

Fossil fuel emissions, destruction of vegetation add 6.9 every year.
The ocean and the atmosphere take back 5.2.
The remaining 1.7 is unaccounted for, in what has been termed "the missing Carbon sink".

Genest, I don't have a global O budget in front of me but I'm pretty sure most of the Oxygen on the planet is in water (H20) and soil (SiO). Do with that what you will. You can say the trees "exhale" O2 and so do the oceans and the soils. They also sequester it. The crucial distinction is whether the two balance each other. The Ocean may "breathe" more O2 than trees, but it is within the tree "breathing" that we have reason to suspect an imbalence.

Source: "Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change" 2nd Ed. by W.H. Schlesinger, 1997. (a classic text on the science of global biogeochemical cycles)

Rob Scott
Urbana, IL





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