In fact, it already appears to be stabilizing. Trees have large reserves of nutrients, but it is likely that the growth stimulation we saw will drop in time. It may abate to zero in ten years, as the trees adapt to the higher carbon dioxide concentrations and growth exceeds the capacity of the soil to provide limiting nutrients. Everything we see above ground will end up back in the atmosphere in one or a few human lifetimes. All of it will die and decompose.
Trees are short-term carbon storage.
Carbon must go into soil to remove it from the atmosphere. DeLucia worked with postdoctoral student Shawna Naidu and project codirectors William Schlesinger of Duke University and George Hendrey of Brookhaven National Laboratory. They and other principal investigators from the University of Illinois, Duke, Brookhaven, and West Virginia University are interested in measuring forests' overall carbon budget. So far, DeLucia said, trees can use higher levels of carbon in photosynthesis, but the question is how much more can they use and ultimately store. This is the first experiment that lets us address this question in the real world.