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Have we started to fill our carbon sinks?

// November 18th, 2009 // Tech News

Each year, human beings put vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through processes like the combustion of fossil fuels or the clearing land for agriculture. Thankfully, the majority of it doesn’t stay there, as there are a number of significant carbon sinks that pull somewhere around 60 percent of human emissions back out of the air, dissolving it into the oceans and sequestering it in growing forests. One of the worries about our continued carbon emissions is that these sinks could eventually start to fill, increasing the challenge involved in limiting the levels of atmospheric carbon. Two new studies have looked at the issue, and they come to what appear to be very different conclusions. Any process that removes carbon from the atmosphere can act as a carbon sink. These include basic processes like having the gas dissolve into the ocean, to more complex ones, like the sequestration that appears to take place in mature forests. The cumulative impact, however, is huge; carbon sinks are estimated to remove about 60 percent of the CO 2 that human activity puts in the atmosphere annually. (The remaining 40 percent is termed the airborne fraction.)