Industrialization weakens important carbon sink Diminishing nature's carbon storage

Maybe one of the reasons climate change has consistently been worse than scientists predicted.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/w-iwi112911.php

Public release date: 29-Nov-2011
Contact: Rhea Kressman
Wiley-Blackwell
Industrialization weakens important carbon sink
Diminishing nature's carbon storage

Australian scientists have reconstructed the past six thousand years in estuary sedimentation records to look for changes in plant and algae abundance. Their findings, published in Global Change Biology, show an increase in microalgae relative to seagrass in the past 60 years. This shift could diminish the ability of estuaries, which are natural global carbon sinks, to mitigate climate change.

According to Dr. Peter Macreadie, University of Technology, Sydney Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, "We have effectively gone back in time and monitored carbon capture and storage by coastal ecosystems, finding a 100-fold weakening in the ability of coastal ecosystems to sequester carbon since the time of European settlement. This severely hampered the ability of nature to reset the planet's thermostat."

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