I was reading today that there’s something like 8 gigatons of CO2 in the air, but more than 400 gigatons of biomass on earth (which is mostly plants). Can someone explain how this happens to me?
Edit: My numbers were off. There’s about 10x as much CO2 mass in the atmosphere as there is biomass on Earth
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Plants are constantly taking CO2 from the air to turn into sugar, which is only part of their biomass. There’s no direct correlation between the amount of CO2 in the air and the amount of sugar or biomass in plants.
As an analogy, you make dough using flour. If you have 1 kg of flour in the cupboard and make a dough using 0.7 kg of flour, you’ll have 0.3 kg of flour in the cupboard and 0.7 kg of dough. Is there some sort of problem that you have more flour in the dough than you have in your cupboard? The two values don’t have any direct relation to each other.
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