While appearing to be good news about the ability of trees to absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion and deforestation, researchers caution that the growth rate likely cannot be sustained. It may abate to zero in 10 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. N.C. The report on overall tree growth was made by Shawna Naidu, a postdoctoral researcher at the U. of I., who also reported that early results from this year appear to indicate the growth increase already may be stabilizing. Naidu's research is in collaboration with DeLucia and project co-directors William Schlesinger of Duke University and George Hendrey of Brookhaven National Laboratory. The overall experiment includes principal investigators from the U. of I., Duke, Brookhaven and West Virginia University. For the project, researchers have surrounded trees with vertical PVC pipes arranged in a circle 30 meters in diameter.