We know just the time scale for solid earth to take up carbon is very,
very long.
So that's not really helping us that much presumably.
It's hard to measure how much is going into the land, because the land is so
heterogeneous, one tract of forest is very different from another and
to know exactly how much carbon is being absorbed is a very difficult
measurement to make actually.
Interestingly, they can measure the carbon uptake in the ocean much more easily,
much more precisely.
[SOUND] So in the early days of thinking about this back in the 1950s and
before, people basically figured that the ocean would control the atmospheric
CO2 concentration and that we wouldn't really be able to change atmospheric CO2,
because the ocean after all has 70% of the earth's surface.
And that it also got a lot more carbon than the atmosphere does,
about 40 times more, and so it's a really heavy hitter in the carbon cycle.
The reason why the ocean doesn't just immediately mop up all of our extra CO2