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Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks

Sebastiaan Luyssaert, E. -Detlef Schulze, Annett Börner

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Alexander Knohl, Dominik Hessenmöller, Beverly E. Law, Philippe Ciais, John Grace

2008 · Nature

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photochemsyn
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Full article, open access, is at Nature Climate Change: Sensitivity of South American tropical forests to an extreme climate anomaly (04 Sep 2023) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01776-4 First time I've seen the word, "necromass" though: > "Among the key processes governing the carbon balance of tropical ecosystems are the rates of tree growth, which takes carbon into the biomass pool, and tree mortality, which transfers it to necromass. In turn, both growth and mortality are likely to depend closely on plant available water, temperature and their fluctuations." Curiously old-growth forests seem to slowly draw down CO2 even at mature stage[1], it may end up…
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sequestered in soil (see also peat bogs, permafrost carbon, etc.). This leads some credence to the notion that recent human activity has 'refertilized' the environment with CO2 - although since we're apparently back to CO2 levels last seen in the Pliocene, 3-5 mya, now would probably be a good time to stop. Re-creating widespread ocean anoxia is not a good idea, even if that's what allowed most oil & gas deposits to form some hundred million years ago. [1] Old-growth forests as carbon sinks (2008). https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276
technobabbler
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I think this is a topic of continuing research. Probably the New Republic doesn't dive too deep into climate research? One original article from 2008 made the case that they suck up a lot of CO2: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 (or https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1038/nature07276) But this finding was challenged in 2021: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150055.h... (or https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/https://www.nature.com/articles/s...) Edit: Dunno if climate is really the best argument there anyway. The old-growths have high biodiversity value, and are hard to regrow. Carbon is more or less a fungible commodity that can be sunk in a billion other ways.
sampo
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2008: Original article [1] 2021: Rebuttal of the 2008 article [2] 2021: same issue of Nature, next 2 pages: Rebuttal of the rebuttal by 6 (out of 8) of the authors of the 2008 article [3] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03266-z [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03267-y
Gravityloss
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At least this science survey concludes that old forests do accumulate carbon. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 Also a lot of the forest mass that gets cut is used for "green energy" so it's worse than letting it stay in the forest. Basically in a periodically burnt (bioenergy) forest the carbon is kept in the atmosphere most of the time while in an old growth forest it's in the trunks all the time.
sp332
Neutral mention · rule
A study from 2008 shows that mature forests still store some carbon. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 "We find that in forests between 15 and 800 years of age, ... forests can continue to accumulate carbon, contrary to the long-standing view that they are carbon neutral."

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