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Controlling Carbon
Tue Aug 30, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook's weekly Global Climate Change segment. 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, or CO2, and get it out of the atmosphere.
Scott Ollinger, a research professor at the University of New Hampshire, has developed a model which suggests that the ability of trees to soak up that CO2 we produce, may be hindered by low-level, or “tropospheric”, ozone. Ollinger explains that, even though the carbon is stored in the trees, we still have to deal with it.
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 serves on the faculty of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, in Durham, NH. His paper on tropospheric ozone was published in Global Change Biology. Our series on Global Climate Change is supported by Environmental Defense. Regular funding for The Weather Notebook comes from Subaru of America.
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