Carbon released from rotting leaves?

The breakout for the amount of carbon dioxide released from the seas, decaying matter and man are as follows:

Decaying matter - 48.4%

Sea life - 48.4%

Human contribution - 3.2%

These are estimates. The total amount fo GHGs that man places into the atmosphere is 5.5% is you exclude H2O and .28% if you include H2O.

Hope this helps.

The estimates that Dawei is giving completely ignore contribution from nature. Some AGWers are silly enough to believe that any change seen in nature is directly caused by man. This is not supportable by science. I'm sure that you are aware that when your Coke warms, it loses its carbonation. In much the same way, the seas is not able to hold as much CO2 when the temps warm. This is why we can be certain that global warming causes more CO2 to be let out into the atmosphere. Now while there is some scientific evidence to suggest that CO2 can also cause some warming, CO2 causing the amount of warming suggested by such people as Algore is absolutely absurd and not supportable by science.

Now since warming causes CO2 to be emitted to the atmosphere, then using the change in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to figure out the amount of human contribution is truly silly. Dawei is usually smart enough not to make such easily refutable errors, he must be having an off day.

EDIT:

Sorry, that was Keith, not Dawei. Mea culpa.

EDIT:

The pressure above the sea level is not increasing enough to counteract the effect of the temp increase. And while you are correct that the seas are able to act as a CO2 sink, their ability to act as a CO2 sink would be lessened by the temp increase. So the analogy still serves. As I'm sure you are aware the purpose of the analogy is to demonstrate the concept. Beyond that, since sea life is producing much of the CO2, the oceans serve as both a sink and a producer.

Beyond that, if you are disagreeing with me would you also not be disagreing with the very models that place a feedback loop for CO2, which is every model.

Decaying Leaves

Just to follow up on Dawei's answer, that 6-7 ppm seasonal rise corresponds to about 50 gigatonnes of CO2, which can be computed from the known mass of the atmosphere. However, it's likely that at least half of the released CO2 is absorbed by natural sinks, so the total release may be 2 or 3 times higher than that.

Can't give you a number for a specific tree, but terrestrial gross primary production and respiration processes tare estimated to release about 119 gigatons of CO2 annually.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/research/themes/carbon/

Of course, this would just be the carbon recently removed from the atmosphere just a few months earlier so it's a zero net increase in CO2 levels over human time scales. The carbon from fossil fuels are carbon removed from our environment millions of years ago, so their release into the environment is an increase in CO2 levels during the time scales that matter to us.

Read about the carbon cycle. Good link from NASA...

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCy...

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere varies seasonally for this reason. CO2 levels in the atmosphere max out in the northern hemisphere's winter due to the dead plant matter, and hit a minimum in the summer after new leaves have grown in.

You can clearly see this effect on the Keeling curve. As you can see, the effect is enough to change concentrations by about 6-7ppm between winter and summer.

http://sio.ucsd.edu/keeling/images/Keeling_Curve.j...

Note that it follows the northern hemisphere's seasons because most of the world's land--and thus plant matter--is in the northern hemisphere.

Yes leaves are EVIL because carbon is unnatural. Oh wait it's not.