I'd like to see what other researchers say about this. A few months ago there was enthusiasm for a substance called glomalin that was storing the carbon. Before that it was buried charcoal or tera preta as practised by the Amazon natives. There was no mention of internalised particles. Clearly the above ground parts of trees are vulnerable to fire, disease and drought so that carbon capture estimates would have to be radically revised every year.

If this line of thinking is headed towards paying farmers to capture carbon I think it is 'barking up the wrong tree'. Agriculture will be difficult enough without disputes over how many tonnes of carbon are locked in a particular paddock. The answer to carbon emissions is to create less in the first place.

Wow…this sounds exciting! I have never heard of this, and am interested to learn more. Does anyone know of any links for further information?

Sequestration of carbon into soil isn't new. Perennial grasslands are a continuous component of achieving this outcome which, in turn, improves soil health and functionality, including moisture retention. Healthy soil is also the most effective form of water storage yet most images of water storage are of large dams.

Pasture cropping is a method of effectively and reliably sequestering carbon into the soil with added benefits of naturally occurring accumulation of nitrogen which is improving crop yields. (The Pasture Cropping system consists of annual cereal crops sown directly into dormant, perennial native grasses so soil disturbance is nil. Timed grazing is an integral activity as the other component of maintaining fully functional grassland ecology.)

Dr Christine Jones www.amazingcarbon.com has been researching this area of ecology for years and is Australia's foremost authority on the subject. There are significant economic benefits for landholders who are involved in this system and the Carbon Coalition is the enterprise creating the trading systems.
www.carboncoalition.com.au

Holistic landholders are the future to our food and fibre production industries as their primary focus is to look after their soils as everything else is totally reliant upon this vital resource.

bush goddess

I think that all avenues of sequestration of carbon should be followed and if this should prove true it is a good thing. Some agricultural waste is better suited to the EPRIDA process. The waste is pyrolized, the waste gases make bio-diesel. The low temperature charcoal is returned to the soil where is acts as substrate for mycellium which increase bioavailability nutrients resulting in increases in fertility of 300%. This a modern way of creating terra preta do indios which was used in the Amazon basin. An amazing story available on line. That carbon has laid locked up for 2000 years.

Very interesting research - all we need is the rain so the crops can grow.

Another technique of storing carbon appeared in the press on the weekend. It involves fertilizing oceans with urea to encourage plankton growth, which require CO2 and sunlight. The theory is that when the plankton die, their carbon rich remains will fall to the ocean floor, storing the carbon indefinitely. This research is a joint US, Japanese and Australian effort, and they are hoping to win Sir Richard Brason's $32m environment prize.

This is good work and deserves support.

But of more immediate concern is whether this 300mt of absorbed CO2 has been, or will be, incorporated into the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) as an existing credit for the nations that have this form of sequestration.

This 300mt/yr amounts to some 5.1 billion tonnes of sequestration since 1990 that has not been considered by the IPCC and has not been added to the climate models. And given our status as an agricultural nation, we should ask how much of this 300mt belongs to Australia.

And when this is combined with the serious under reporting of other forms of landuse carbon sequestration, like regrowth and thickenning, and assumptions that cleared land releases all its carbon in the clearing year, then the anomalies are mounting to a level that will seriously distort (overstate) long term emission projections.

The culpability of the IPCC is further emphasised by their absurd policy of denying any credit to carbon sequestration functions that started prior to 1990. In this one incredibly stupid act, they effectively preclude 95% of the existing landscape from making any meaningful contribution to further carbon sequestration.

You have to be seriously stupid to try encouraging landowners to absorb carbon by delivering a huge kick in the guts to every landowner that was already doing the job prior to 1990.

But thats the IPCC for you. And they expect me to take them seriously.

Perseus, I dont disagree with you. But a line needs to be drawn in the sand somewhere. Suppose its 1990. Dont count any emmissions or sequestrations prior to that point. Yes, some will be penalised, but to go back further just gets too complex.

The authors of the article point to an additional income stream for farmers that wont impact the yield income from crop harvesting. I would be a little cautious on this - I would expect to see some trade off between harvest yield and plantsone yield. So long as the income from one covers the other, then there shouldnt be too many problems.

We agree on most things, country gal, but not this one. We must give credit where credit is due, to every form of anthropogenic carbon sequestration. No-one is taxed on their pre-1990 emissions but people can be taxed on their past sequestration.

I have 5,000 tonnes of carbon on my property that was not there in 1942. And when I go to sell some of that carbon, in good order and stable, as timber to someone else I will most probably be taxed at $40-$50/tonne. And that is $200,000 to $250,000 in total for carbon that has only been sequestered because my family chose to let trees grow in the places my grandfather was forced to clear as a condition of title.

And because we started absorbing carbon before 1990 we will get no credits for any growth that takes place after 1990 but will still pay carbon tax when those newly grown trees are harvested under some sort of "business as usual" euphemism for gross injustice.

Meanwhile "joe suburb", who owns no trees and who pats himself on the back and takes a high moral tone for reducing his per capita emissions from 27.5 tonnes CO2 (7.65tC) down to 18 tonnes CO2 (5.0tC) will only pay $200 to $250 a year in carbon tax.

The IPCC assumes that every native forest that was present prior to 1990 is an untouched old growth forest that loses as much carbon through decay as it absorbs through growth. This is plain wrong and to persist with this illusion is deliberate, premeditated act of injustice. They then assume that any harvesting, even of trees that are beginning to rot faster than they add growth, amounts to a reduction in sequestered carbon stocks. The fact that other trees in the forest will quickly grow to replace the volume of carbon in the removed tree, is totally beyond the IPCC's wit.

Thanks OLO!

The article is very interesting and if there is an economic advantage, then it should be exploited. There are parts of the article I do not understand. Perhaps the authors may consider the needs of non-technical readers a little more.

Somone asked about other sites and I found:
http://plantstone.com.au/

Perseus says he's going to be taxed for selling timber. I don't see how that makes sense. Harvesting existing timber does not create CO2. But if so, sell it off before the tax arrives, then plant more trees and pocket the carbon credits. Surely a workable carbon credit system treats plantation timber as a carbon sink.

From the lack of comment on the research described in this article, one would think it is April 1st.
I think the authors should put the potential of their findings in perspective to encourage discussion.

From my layman’s view point, 300 million tonnes of CO2 stored by phytoliths each year in the natural carbon cycle represents about 4 percent of the CO2 emitted from the burning of fossil fuels per year[7500 million tonne].

If cropping accounts for one third of this 300 million tonnes and we tripled the CO2 stored by new cropping practices then we are looking at socking away 4 percent of the worlds fossil fuels emissions, with the potential to achieve much more.

That these people have to ask the Government for support is disgraceful.
Instead of solving the climate change problem by encouraging such people in every way possible, we endure political point scoring and profiteering from carbon trading schemes

I think that there is many a slip twix the cup and the lip with carbon trading. I have no problem with people being rewaarded for genuine long tern carbon sesqiestration. This is why I favour EPRIDA at present. The University of Georgia has being doing work on this with the idea of making small scale units for use in the third world. Their figures suggest that 10 tons of waste will make 3.2 tons of biodiesel and 1.5 tons of low temperature charcoal. Carbon credits should be available this carbon. The charcoal increases soil fertility by a factor of 3 and stays in the soil for 2 thousand years. The system will also increase farm incomes

Phytoloiths to the rescue? We don't have to get stoned on grass to accept that there are benefits; that scientific inquiry into such areas is worth supporting; of more interest than great-grandad's scythe blades having been quickly blunted by it.
But, what pecking-order do phytoliths occupy in the biosphere where carbon is king? Where all living things are built from carbon - with calcium or silica for scaffolding, phosphorous and other elements only as facilitators? In practicality, this planet's biomass is carbon - all life. It is long past time that Homo sapiens put its own status in perspective. About a quarter of all that biomass is what we consider the lowest of the low - fungus and its ilk. And we get free service from it. Some of those services are both indispensable and irreplaceable. They don't need feeding or watering - just respect for their particular environments. The top 300 millimetres of earth is one environment normally chockers with mycological entities; most heavily populated in the surface layer.
Mycology benefits vegetation, commercial or otherwise. It is readily disturbed by large-scale monoculture and is difficult to re-establish.
Agriculture associated with huge volumes of wind and water erosion of surface soils is responsible for the removal of carbon from it in huge quantities. Most, upon decomposition, escapes to the atmosphere as CO2.
Only a small proportion of the commercial agricultural community is taking steps which automatically foster mycological health. Further support, and assistance from science, is appropriate.
Phytolith research does need funding because it is a component, if only small, of the vast ecology of soil and planet health - of which the largely invisible world of mycology is dominant.
What chance does that research, in part or whole, have of obtaining funding? Under current philosophy, nil: The Government is unlikely to see, in two years, immediate cash benefit accruing from it. We will just have to make the best of the view from the handbasket taking us to hell under this, or any likely alternative, administration.

Perseus, when you put it in that context I can see your point. A difficult situation.

It is not that simple, David. The cutting of a tree is a deemed emission under IPCC rules. And when we started expanding the forest the only seed stock we could buy was Pine. So we collected our own seeds, grew seedlings and only planted in areas where natural regeneration was not successful. So we started with a widely spaced plantation in an assisted regeneration site but that is now classed as a native forest.

And as it has multiple species of differing ages we cannot cut all the trees and replant a plantation because most of the trees are not ready for harvest, even if it was legal to convert native forest to plantation, which it is not.

The IPCC's rules not only impose a tax on all our past carbon sequestration but also all of our future growth. And it is not just us. There are millions of hectares of private native forest that has reclaimed formerly cleared land that are precluded from making any meaningful contribution to carbon management.

In our own case, our forest is capable of absorbing just under 1000 tonnes of CO2 each year in perpetuity as each tree that is cut ends up in a product that lasts longer than it takes the remaining trees and new seedlings to replace it. And when one understands how badly the IPCC has stuffed this up, one can't help wondering what else they have wrong as well.

The presumption that forests are effective carbon sinks while pasture is worthless is simply not true. As Freeman Dyson has been saying for years "It's roots, not shoots".
You will notice that these assertions focus entirely on the biomass above ground level and studiously ignore what is going on below ground.
Given that pine trees in particular tend to toxify the soil beneath them I would be surprised if there were any grounds to discourage the conversion of pine forests into well managed pasture - if we are concerned about total net greenhouse gas emissions.
Dyson and others make the point that while our ignorance of the chemistry of climate remains profound, our ignorance of the relationship between climate and the biosphere is laughable given that governments routinely make pronouncements about carbon sinks and propose to penalise farmers who may well have the potential to totally resolve the perceived "greenhouse" problem.
For some reason politians and bureaucrats love to pick on the agricultural sector and remarkably many in the farming community seem to be more than willing to accept the blame.
Finally, a policy of increasing top-soil depth is a classic "No regrets" policy. Should the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming prove to be without foundation then increasing topsoil will still have been a useful exercise, unlike so many proposals which diminish wealth and wellbeing.
So next time the Minister suggests that forest owners who convert to pasture be required to pay a fine ask him to provide the equation which established the comparitive sequestration of carbon by trees and pasture – including the role of the topsoil and the ongoing replenishment of the pasture's total biomass. If he mentions methane remind him of the recent research which reveals that forests release methane too, and what is the comparitive release of pasture and forest?

Good point, Owen. One can also tell the Minister that the conversion of forest to grassland actually increases the albedo or reflected heat of the landscape and therefore contributes to global cooling.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the IPCC insists on measuring all of the above ground carbon as an emission in the year the land is cleared. Yet, I have stumps on my place that still have their carbon very much intact from being cleared in 1927.

So we have this scam where the climate cretins claim emissions are taking place that will not occur for another 50 years or more while at the same time completely ignoring the cooling effect of the forest removal.

And of course, whenever one has a climate model that is capable of measuring 50 years of emissions before they actually take place, and ignoring the 50 to 500 years of cooling that will result from the clearing, then the model is bound to indicate that the planet is getting warmer.

This is especially so when Land Use Change accounts for 19% of all modelled emissions. It is a classic case of "garbage in, garbage out".

Response to Perseus:

I cannot make much sense of your post. IPCC is the Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change. They do not impose taxes. Australia has not ratified Koyoto. Whatever the land clearing rules are in your area, they are a state government matter and I'm not in a position to comment. I don't know much about land clearing, but you seem to be talking about a future carbon trading system.

In terms of the carbon cycle, plantation timber is advantageous. Unlike food crops, the captured carbon is stored as the timbers used to create the built environment. Of course, this is small potatoes compared to transport and energy.