With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

escaped from western European forests and fields. This was roughly
equivalent to twice Europe's emissions from burning fossil fuels during
those two months. All the carbon absorbed in recent years was being
dumped back into the atmosphere in double-quick time. The rapid exhaling
of the continent's ecosystems was "unprecedented in the last century," said
Ciais. But he judged that it was likely to be repeated "as future droughts turn
temperate ecosystems from carbon sinks into carbon sources."
Europe seemed to have fast-forwarded into a nightmare future strapped
to a runaway greenhouse effect. And it soon emerged that Europe's carbon
crisis was part of a more general story of summer stress across the Northern
Hemisphere. Ning Zeng, of the University of Maryland, found an area of
drought stretching from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. It had lasted
from 1998 to 2002, and had eliminated a natural carbon sink across the
region that had averaged 770 million tons a year over the previous two
decades.
Alon Angert, of the University of California at Berkeley, explained the big
picture. Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the "C02 fertilization
effect" had been working rather well, with increased photosynthesis in the
Northern Hemisphere soaking up ever more carbon dioxide. But sometime
around 1993 that had tailed off, probably because of droughts and higher
temperatures. And since the mid-1990s, the carbon sink had been in sharp
decline. From the Mediterranean to central Asia, and even in the high
latitudes of Siberia and northern Europe, the added uptake of carbon by
plants in the early spring was canceled out by the heat and water stress of
hotter, drier summers. The findings, Angert said, dashed widespread
expectations of a continuing "greening trend" in which warm summers