“NATURE has her own way of dealing with excess carbon dioxide.“
What, pray, is “excess carbon dioxide”? Do they mean sufficient resource to enable greater biosphere exploitation, usually termed “primary production”?
When human activities spew CO2 into the atmosphere, plants absorb more of it than usual, leading to profuse growth. The ocean, too, swallows more than it otherwise would. Many scientists fret that these so-called carbon sinks risk getting clogged up. Some even suggest that this has already started happening.
Ashley Ballantyne, a geologist at the University of Colorado, and colleagues are less gloomy. In a paper published recently in Nature they show that over the past 50 years Earth’s absorption of CO2 has nearly doubled. Yet they see no evidence of a slowdown in the rate at which this takes place. If the climate models suggest otherwise, the researchers argue, then the modellers must have got their sums wrong.
