The Carbon Cycle

Now look at the diagram to the right supplied by windows2universe.org/. To the naked eye it may seem confusing and unrelated to the topic, but with a short explination you will be able to see how understanding this is essential to understanding the issue we're dealing with.

But let's focus on the latter* half of the picture. For one thing, this is now the dominant source of climate change if you didn't know already. To quote windows2universe.org
and adapted by fas.org/;

"When humans burn fossil fuels to power factories, power plants, cars and trucks, most of the carbon quickly enters the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas. Each year, five and a half billion tons of carbon is released by burning fossil fuels. That’s the weight of 100 million adult African elephants! Of the huge amount of carbon that is released from fuels, 3.3 billion tons enters the atmosphere and most of the rest becomes dissolved in seawater... But humans have burned so much fuel that there is about 30% more carbon dioxide in the air today than there was about 150 years ago. The atmosphere has not held this much carbon for at least 420,000 years according to data from ice cores. More greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are causing our planet to become warmer... Each person in the U.S. generates approximately 2.3 tons of CO2 each year. A healthy tree stores about 13 pounds of carbon annually -- or 2.6 tons per acre each year. An acre of trees absorbs enough CO2 over one year to equal the amount produced by driving a car 26,000 miles."


And according to FAS.org, the world's forests are being removed at approximataly 1 acre per second. That equals 86,400 acres per day, 220 square miles or 350 square kilometres.

And considering that roughly one third of the earth's surface is forest, and the area of the earth according to hypertextbook.com is quote; "About 198 million square miles". That means that 65,340,000 square miles of the earth is forest. So math says that there will be a end to forest's in 3.3670033670033670033670033670034e-6 (e stands for exponent) days.

Have fun figuring that out... but it will be sooner than you think because I calculated it.

Hope you found this post educational!

* latter is another way of saying the back half of something, the last thing listed or sometimes to dictate that something is to thr right.