A Breathing Planet, Off Balance; Video

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk11DVaAjEA[/youtube]
A Nasa Climate Change Video (2:32)Published on Youtube Video, November 12,2015.

Excerpts;

Earth’s oceans and land cover are doing us a favor. As people burn fossil fuels and clear forests, only half of the carbon dioxide released stays in the atmosphere, warming and altering Earth’s climate. The other half is removed from the air by the planet’s vegetation ecosystems and oceans.

As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue their rapid, man-made rise past levels not seen for hundreds of thousands of years, NASA scientists and others are confronted with an important question for the future of our planet: How long can this balancing act continue? And if forests, other vegetation and the ocean cannot continue to absorb as much or more of our carbon emissions, what does that mean for the pace of climate change in the coming century?

These questions are a major priority for NASA’s Earth science research program, and the agency is preparing to ramp up its field studies, satellite monitoring and computer modeling to help answer them. Carbon is a fundamental element of life on Earth, but the increasing amount of carbon in the atmosphere — in the form of carbon dioxide and methane molecules — is also the primary element driving our warming climate. Scientists are studying how carbon moves through Earth’s atmosphere, land and ocean with an array of tools, including a new dataset of the ebbs and flows of carbon in the air.

“Today and for the past 50 to 100 years, the oceans and land biosphere have consistently taken up about half of human emissions,” said Dave Schimel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “If that were to change, the effect of fossil emissions on climate would also change. We don’t understand that number, and we don’t know how it will change in the future…”

Read Full Article, NASA

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