USA, Carbon Absorber

The reason that Kyoto is rigged up the way it is, discounting any absorption of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses is because such an arrangement would not favor Europe, an impugn the United States if greenies are shocked with their usual false indignation for the US, we should wait and see whether or not these same people treat Canada with the same spitefulness having signed on to that unproductive treaty, many are having second thoughts, and wondering how they would ever be able to achieve their targets at all. Canadian greenies on the other hand, have engaged in the usual brute force tactics of Liberal Party politics.

Absorption has long been known to be a major factor in air temperature, and yet still ignored:

«"We know that we who reside in the United States emit about 6.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year," said Taro Takahashi, Doherty Senior Research Scientist, associate director of Lamont-Doherty, Columbia's earth sciences campus in Palisades, N.Y., and an author of the report. "As an air mass travels from west to east, it should receive carbon dioxide and the East Coast concentration of CO2 should be higher than on the West Coast.

"But observations tell us otherwise. The mean atmospheric CO2 concentration on the East Coast has been observed to be lower than that over the Pacific coast. This means that more CO2 is taken up by land ecosystems over the United States than is released by industrial activities."

The results suggest the presence of a carbon sink, which occurs when carbon dioxide absorbed by plants as they grow exceeds carbon dioxide released by dead material as it decays. Although the method does not identify the causes, there are a number of possible mechanisms that could be responsible for the sink. Forest regrowth in areas where generations of pioneers leveled trees to create farmland almost certainly plays an important role. Millions of acres east of the Mississippi have returned to forest.

Forest regrowth, and carbon absorption, in North America may be enhanced by some side effects of industrialization. Nitrogen deposition in soil, a result of combustion processes in automobiles and power plants, can act as a fertilizer, as can the higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the air. Global warming itself can contribute to longer growing seasons, which have been observed in studies of satellite measurements cited by the team.»

Of course they won't count it - nor will Europe meet their own Kyoto targets. So long as it's politically useful, they'll keep up with their little fiction, but I don't expect that to last long. At least the part where they actually do what they set out to.