PREFACE 



The change that man is making in the world carbon budget is 

 among the most abrupt and fundamental changes that the bio- 

 sphere has experienced in all of world history. The change is in 

 the stuff of life itself and is by now common knowledge. The 

 starkly simple, upward-trending graphs of the C0 2 content of air 

 at Mauna Loa have become a part of the educated man's back- 

 ground in science. But the implications of the change are far less 

 clear than the fact of change. Why has the change not been more? 

 Or less? Where does the carbon go? What does the future hold? 



The topic is of unquestioned importance and has been 

 addressed recently by various learned groups (SCEP,* 1970; 

 SMIC,t 1971; and at the Nobel Symposium 20, i 1971). These 

 studies have emphasized that prediction is dependent not only on 

 collaboration among scientists of diverse disciplines but on new 

 knowledge: the biosphere is poorly known. 



More than a hundred scientists gathered at Brookhaven 

 National Laboratory from May 16 to 18, 1972, under the 

 auspices of the 24th Brookhaven Symposium in Biology to make 

 a new appraisal of the world carbon budget. The appraisal was 

 incomplete. Despite an explicit attempt to include it, there was 

 no treatment of one of the largest and most active pools of 

 carbon: humus and peat. Nonetheless, this publication includes 

 specific attempts at presenting the most modern estimates of 

 various dimensions of the biota, including both biomass and 



*A1an's Impact on the Global Environment, Report of the Study of 

 Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP), The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 

 1970. 



\Study of Man's Impact on the Climate, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 

 Mass., 1971. 



$C hanging Chemistry of the Oceans (Nobel Symposium 20), David 

 Dryssen and Daniel Jagner (Eds.), Halstead Press, New York, 1972. 



in 



