14 DAY TRIAL // A viable solution for reducing global warming by storing carbon dioxide could be having forests of genetically altered tress and plants, that would capture some billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, suggests estimates published in the October issue of BioScience.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, carried out a study of several strategies that could help plants gather and store more carbon dioxide from the air, by converting it into long-lived forms of carbon within vegetation that will end up in soil.
They came up with several ideas, like increasing the plants' capacity of absorbing the light, but the most innovative by far, was the genetic alteration of plants, so that they could send more carbon into their roots, so that part of it can be transformed into soil carbon and get out of the vicious circuit.
Also, scientists could transform plants so that they develop a higher resistance to the stress of growing on marginal land, thus furnishing better food crops and bioenergy.
All these human interventions could help plants extract much more carbon dioxide from the air, the specialists say, and this is highly necessary in today's environment.
This article was written by Christer Jansson, Stan D. Wullschleger, Udaya C. Kalluri, and Gerald A. Tuskan, and it is the first in a Special Section in the October BioScience that gives several solutions for enhancing biological carbon sequestration.
In the same section, there are several other articles that focus on the ecological and economic constraints that would be an impediment to these efforts.
One of them proposes the solution of culturing algae that produces biofuel feedstocks, another is about the changing if the current regulatory climate for producing genetically engineered trees in the United States, and, finally, a third one focuses on society's perceptions of the problems of the genetically altered organisms to ameliorate warming attributed to the buildup of greenhouse gases.