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Originally Posted by freeztar
Quote:
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Originally Posted by e-dude
With no animal life, the carbon from the dead plants would just sit in the soil once the plant decayed, and become coal or petroleum or whatever.
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Do you include bacteria in "animals"?
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Yes, that sentence begs the question....
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I'd wanted to reply but got sidetracked--and Maikeru and Freeztar seem to have summed it up nicely.
Still, I want to again emphasize the importance of that 1.5 Trillion tons of terrestrial "old" biomass.
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Engineerdude,
Yes, the amount photosynthesized in a year is proportional to the amount of new biomass created by those photosynthesizers.
The important number to focus on however, is the amount of that new biomass which gets incorporated into the 1.5 trillion tons of old biomass--versus the amount of new biomass that simply cycles back into the atmosphere.
In addition to how much of the new biomass is being cycled into the old biomass,
another important number is the amount of old biomass that is being disturbed, dried, or in whatever way destroyed--and thus adding anew the old carbon that had been sequestered in the terrestrial microbiome since the soil formed after the last ice age.
A small percentage change, or trendline up or down, in that terrestrial "old biomass"
which
is more than an order of magnitude larger than any of the annual carbon pools
is going to affect our atmosphere more than the annual carbon cycles. IMHO
