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Carbon
01/07/2003
Listen in RealAudio 
A carbon sink, as we have learned on earlier episodes of The Weather Notebook, is a process by
which plants and soil can trap carbon dioxide and get it out of the atmosphere. Hi, I'm Bryan
Yeaton for The Weather Notebook's weekly Global Climate Change segment.
Last week, Scott Ollinger, a research professor at the University of New Hampshire, discussed
a new model which suggests the low-level ozone might hinder the ability of trees to soak up
the CO2.
This week, Ollinger talks about what happens to all the carbon that the trees absorb.
SO: Among some people there's a notion that if we want forests to take up carbon dioxide
well, can't we just cut them all down and then the regrowing forests can take up carbon
dioxide at an even faster rate? That's true but it ignores the fate of the carbon that's in
the trees that you've harvested and that carbon doesn't just disappear but, when those trees
decompose or are burned or whatever their fate might be, that carbon dioxide eventually is
going to wind up back in the atmosphere.
BRYAN: So it can go back quickly in a fire or slowly as it rots.
SO: That's right. And when we talk about carbon dioxide with respect to climate change we
tend to refer to it as the carbon cycle. Cycle is really a critical word because the flow of
carbon into ecosystems is not one-way. It enters the ecosystem and then it leaves the
ecosystem, either through immediate combustion or through long-term decomposition.
Scott Ollinger's paper on tropospheric ozone was recently published in Global Change Biology.
He serves on the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, in Durham,
NH. Our series on Global Climate Change is supported by the New England Science Center
Collaborative, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Thanks today to the entire Weather Notebook
staff, Doug Sanborn, Melody Nester, Sean Doucette and Peter Crane.
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