Passage:(1) Between burning fossil fuels and clearing forests, humans Emit far more carbon dioxide than Earth's natural physical and biologicaprocesses can remove from the atmosphere. (2) Fundamentalattempts to understand, slow, or reverse the buildup of atmospcarbon dioxide is a global accounting of where it's released and stored. (3) That's why scientists at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Laboratory created CarbonTracker: a carbon dioxide measuring and modeling syster that tracks sources and sinks around the globe.(4) When it comes to carbon dioxide's influence on Earth's surface temperature, the only thing that really matters is the bottom line: how much there is in the atmosphere. (5) But when it comes to understanding how natural processes and human activities influence that bottom line, everything matters: where and when the carbon is released, where and when it's sequestered, how weather and climate and human decisions influence surface carbon fluxes.(6) Those details are critical not only for predicting future climatechange, but also for understanding how agricultural and ecologicalsystems will respond to rising carbon dioxide concentrations. (7) Being able to say with confidence where and how much carbon dioxide is stored and released by different landscapes and activities will also be a prerequisite for evaluating carbon mitigation strategies.