Houghton Lectures

The contemporary global carbon budget.

The global carbon cycle plays a key role in regulating climate and climate change. Natural reservoirs on land and in the ocean hold large quantities of carbon, which is exchanged with the atmosphere on time scales ranging from seconds to hundreds of thousands of years. This first lecture will explain what we know about the contemporary carbon cycle. It will detail the processes that regulate the storage of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere and in the ocean and present the latest data on the trends and variability in these ‘carbon sinks’. The observed changes in the carbon sinks will be discussed in the context of a changing climate.