The Peatlands of China's Changbai Mountains

As background for their study, Bao et al. (2010) write that peatland ecosystems "play a key role in the global carbon cycle and are influenced by global climate change," within which context the world's climate alarmists say the ongoing warming of the planet will lead to great releases of previously-sequestered carbon to the atmosphere in the form of CO₂ and methane, which will greatly exacerbate global warming, as was suggested by Al Gore in his 21 March 2007 testimony before the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.

Working in the Changbai mountain region that runs along the boundary between China and North Korea, Bao et al. extracted eight peat cores that they analyzed for numerous parameters, among which were those required to calculate the recent rate of carbon accumulation (RERCA) in the peatlands of that region over the past two centuries.

In describing their findings, the four researchers report that "obvious increasing trends in RERCA were observed in all peat cores," as "organic carbon content declined from the top to the substrate." What is more, they say that the temporal increase in RERCA in the upper regions of the cores -- which likely corresponded to the warmest segment of their two-century study period -- "changed to a much greater extent in recent decades than in the earlier period of peat formation."

As has been found to be the case with other peatlands, this most recent study out of China indicates that the world's climate alarmists have got things one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with reality in terms of the influence of earth's peatlands on the planet's temperature. These land types provide a negative feedback to global warming, whereby when they warm, they extract more -- not less -- CO₂ from the atmosphere, applying a brake on rising temperatures, as opposed to pushing the planet past a "tipping point" of the type that acolytes of Al Gore would have everyone believe would lead to catastrophic runaway global warming.