Carbon Sinks and Global Climate Change :: Environment Earth Papers

Carbon sinks have been a hot subject surrounding world(a) humor change. To to a lower placestand this debate it is first intrinsic to understand what carbon sinks atomic number 18 and what they do. Plants have the natural ability to put out up carbon dioxide from atmosphere, storing it as carbon. In relation to global climate change, plants, especially trees, ordure help to absorb some of the carbon dioxide that valet de chambre have emitted into the atmosphere. This becomes one possible solution in mitigating climate change. As with many possible solutions to climate change, there are positive and damaging sides of carbon sinks as a mitigation option. There is also sort of a divergence of viewpoints between countries. The issue of carbon sinks continues to be debated today. Is this an country in which consensus and cooperation can occur? Unfortunately, this has just been another area in which there has been controversy in global environmental politics. After an in depth look at the negative and positive aspects of carbon sinks in relation to global climate change, it seems at this time the negative aspects outperform the positive. Due to scientific uncertainty, an inadequate monitoring and measuring system, as head as a lack of rules and guidelines, the use of carbon sinks will resurrect to be more of a problem than a solution to the global climate change problem. First of all, what are carbon sinks? The earth contains heterogeneous natural stocks or reservoirs of carbon. These stocks can be found in the ocean, forests, soils, and the atmosphere. When one of these stocks get outs carbon, such as when a forest is reduced by fire, decomposition, or deforestation, it is known as a source of carbon. When these stocks absorb carbon they are called sinks (Sedjo, 4). The ocean can hold the most carbon it contains active litre times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Forests and soils contain about 3.5 times as much carbon as the atmosphere (Kolshus, 2). This authorship mostly focuses on carbon sinks in forests because it is soon the subject under debate in the climate change regime. Sinks can be apply to mitigate global climate change in two ship canal either by producing new forests to absorb the carbon, or by preventing the release of carbon into the atmosphere through actions such as deforestation (Pagiola, 25). However, currently there is a lack of consensus as to how much carbon can actually be absorbed by these sinks.