Carbon Cycle

In the same way we learn about the water cycle at school, we should start learning about the cycle that carbon follows in our world. However, I'm not sure I can really understand it.

• Plants absorb carbon dioxide . Is it used by their cells? Do they break CO2 to keep the carbon and that makes wood?
• Plants die, the carbon they'd captured gets into the soil. Or the wood is chopped.
• Either burning fossil fuels or burning wood is more or less the same, it is a matter of time scale.
• CO2 is released to the atmosphere by natural means and human activity such as burning.
• The cycle re-starts

Are plants the biggest absorbents of CO2? What about water? Can CO2 diffuse into the oceans? And bacteria or other single-cell organisms?

When a tree dies, isn't all the carbon captured released again to the atmosphere? What prevents it? Are the roots of trees actually pushing carbon to the soil during the lifetime of a tree?

Does a tree capture more carbon than its own weight?

Tags: #climate-change #education