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Carbon Cycle
The result is that CO2 lasts like 'forever', making CO2 emissions highly persistent and cumulative in the atmosphere. The great climate significance is shonw by the bathtub analogy
Video of simple bathtub analogy
Climate Interactive Bathtub simulation
National Geographic Bathtub analogy for the significance of the carbon cycles for climate change.
The carbon cycle before industrialization was in balance
1. Short term carbon cycle
This cycle operates over one to a few hundreds of years.
What are often called carbon sinks like tropical forests only store
carbon temporarily.
The only real carbon sinks operate by the long term cycle.
This is what 'the carbon cycle' is understood to be, but it cannot
help us to mitigate global warming and climate change because
it does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere in time frame
for humanity.
It recycles carbon between the atmosphere land and ocean.
It depends on life food chain on land and in oceans.
For both the land and oceans this cycle works by photosynthesis
of green plants, the largest contribution comes from ocean
surface phytoplankton - the tiniest of green plants.
Photosynthesis captures energy from sunlight via chloroplast cells which energizes the growth and metabolism of the plant. But when the plant decays and dies that CO2 is returned to the atmosphere.
On land the dead life sinks through the ground and is thereby pressurized. over millions of years this forms coal oil and natural gas.
In the oceans the carbon sinks to the ocean floor by means of what is called the ocean biological carbon pump by which atmospheric carbon is incorporated into sea shells as calcium carbonate.
The atmospheric concentration of CO2 cannot stabilize long term unless all fossil fuel and industrial carbon emissions stop.
This is because CO2 cannot be removed in a permanent sense except by the ultra-long carbon cycle, which is fossil carbon formation
VIDEO oil and gas formation with time line
Lots of illustrations here to help understand the carbon cycle(s).
It is the carbon cycle that determines the fact that global warming, climate change, and ocean acidification can never stabilize without our civilization stopping the constant industrial addition of carbon dioxide to atmosphere.
The fact is, there are two carbon cycles.
There is a short term cycle, we think of as the carbon cycle. It is really a re-cycle that does not remove CO2
It is only by the (ultra) long term that removes CO2 and operates on a geological time-frame, by forming fossil carbon
The cycles are terrestrial (land) and ocean.
Fossil Fuel Carbon Sink.To understand the carbon cycle significance in climate mitigation, the ultra-slow formation of fossil fuels is key.
For Earth and the future are actually forms of fossil carbon true carbon sinks
This process is the long or slow carbon cycle.
Most of us know that the formation of coal, oil and gas goes back to the deep distant past-in fact many millions of years ago. The geologists know that the coal oil and gas burnt today took millions of years to form. Sinking carbon (removal from the carbon cycle) takes at least hundreds of thousands of years.
The process is that slow.
'Fossil fuels were formed from plants and animals that lived 300 million years ago in primordial swamps and oceans. Over time the plants and animals died and decomposed under tons of rock and ancient seas
Eventually, many of the seas receded and left dry land with fossil fuels like coal buried underneath it'
Coal was formed going back 300 million years with the youngest coal 1 million old.
Oil and gas go back many hundreds of millions of years ago, up to 40 million years ago.
Fossil fuels being constantly burnt are releasing carbon at an unprecedented rate, but they took forever to form
CO2 does not react in the atmosphere (like methane) It stays as CO2 and can only decline in the atmosphere by being stored as fossil carbon, which take forever. This is why CO2 lasts in the atmosphere like 'forever'. 1000 years after CO2 emission, 20% is still in the atmosphere
The short term and (ultra) long term carbon cycles
2 Long term carbon cycle
It is only this extremely long term carbon cycle that sinks carbon in terms of removing carbon (CO2) from the carbon cycle in relevant to humanity and most life
It operates over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years through the land and oceans. In both cases the organic carbon from dead life forms is pressurized over ages of time to form solid fossil carbon.
On land this is fossil carbon- coal, oil and gas. The coal we burn up in no time took millions of years to form.
Ocean
The ocean process forms rock- limestone and dolomite. This starts with the minute ocean surface plants called phytoplankton. This is how most of the carbon dioxide gets absorbed. Through the ocean food chain the carbon gets converted by shell forming organisms to calcium carbonite. Through ages of time and pressure in the ocean floor sediment, calcium carbonate based rock is formed- limestone and dolomite.
We are rapidly returning this carbon to the atmosphere by burning it. Land fossil carbon we burn to produce heat energy as fossil fuels. Limestone we burn to make cement
Because it takes so extremely long to sink atmospheric CO2 our emissions will last in the atmosphere 'for ever' on the human time scale, making global climate change and ocean acidification in effect irreversible.
Fossil fuels = Carbon sink
