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Computare
Carbon Cycle Summary
•Is IPCC view of carbon cycle one sided?
–Deems agricultural production “natural”
–Deems forestry activities “natural”
•Human control of land based carbon cycle
–Fossil fuels 6 billion tonnes
–24 billion tonnes of plant production
•Opportunity
–Better integrate energy and carbon control
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Our review of the carbon cycle raises some questions. Are these IPCC figures and data subtly downplaying the degree of human influence on the carbon cycle? Is our use of fossil fuels overemphasized as the source of the problem?
A paper from (Vitousek et al [1]) from 1986 suggests that humans appropriate about 40% of plant production. That suggests we control 24 billion tonnes of the carbon removed from the atmosphere by plants. That’s a lot bigger than the 6.3 billion tonnes we add from fossil fuels.
Is it possible we have greater opportunities to control atmospheric greenhouse gas levels than to just reduce fossil fuel consumption? Could we take lessons from the carbon cycle and strategically use more energy to manage levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? I think so.








[1] HUMAN APPROPRIATION OF THE PRODUCTS OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS
by Peter Vitousek, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich and Pamela Matson (1986)
Originally published in BioScience, (Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1986), copyright 1986 by BioScience.