Humans accidentally created hidden carbon sink in the desert | Hacker News Reader

Humans accidentally created hidden carbon sink in the desert

newscientist.com

68 pointsgz513 comments

I'm not sure I understand how the carbon is being stored here. Is it in the form of dissolved CO2 that's with the salts dissolved?

And how did humans create this store?

This article seems very light on details.

Agricultural runoff. Some amount of CO2 dissolves in the runoff, then it enters the aquifer, where it remains. As far as carbon sinks go it's probably pretty small but it's interesting nonetheless.

That makes sense. I was discounting ag runoff as negligable, which I shouldn't have done.

So we are saved and we don't have to worry about global warming any more, nor even food shortages? All we need is lots of water and to farm in the desert. Awesome.

I think from now on we will always have to at least think about the climate. It is not a stable system and we can easily impact it if we do not take care, and at the same time we will need to impact it at some point (eg new ice age).

But hey, it is good training for terraforming other planets I guess, at least the research will be more mature.

A little bit of global warming won't hurt. I'd like to have Coconut palms growing in the UK.

Coconut palms don't grow under water.

If you Google for London Clay you will learn that UK used to be full of tropical plants. Why not have that again?

If by "why not", you mean physical possibility, maybe because the UK is not going to become tropical again any time soon?

I seem to remember seeing palm trees growing in Cornwall?

Sorry, but the UK gets the crappy end of the global warming stick. Increasing temperatures melt the Greenland ice sheets, which decreases the salinity of the north atlantic. That shuts down the processes that drive the gulf stream, which brings warm water to us and gives us a warmer climate than most regions at our latitude. So global warming may well end up making the UK colder.

Is that actually accepted thinking now/still? I was taught this logic by my prep. school geography teacher ~15 years ago, but I haven't heard it touted much lately, so maybe it's no longer the most common expectation?

A (very) little googling didn't bring up that prediction, generally it's thought that the UK's temperature will indeed rise from global warming. For example this [1] piece in the Guardian from a couple of years ago suggests that global warming is likely to lead to wetter winters and more flooding, and summers that are both dryer and hotter. Similar stuff from a random city council's website (Bradford)[1].

Obviously the recent anecdotal data also supports rising temperatures (the five hottest years on record for UK are 1995, 2006, 1990, 2011 and 2014 with the latter being the hottest, and I think 2015 set to top that), but doesn't necessarily mean that the ice melting won't cause UK temperatures to drop again... but the fact that predictions don't seem to take it into account, my assumption is that either it's plain wrong, or it used to be the commonly accepted expectation and is no longer, or perhaps it's still expected but over a larger timeframe than the next 100 years?

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/08/potential...

[1] http://www.bradford.gov.uk/bmdc/the_environment/climate_chan...

I have no idea, thanks for posting the links.

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