2010? Won't it be too late by 2010? Shouldn't these folks be working weekends and working through their lunch hours?
Posted by Muck at August 20, 2008 06:33 PMChristina, Is it a given that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for about a century? Have you read the recent report from Oliver Tickell posted in England?
Posted by peter at August 20, 2008 06:57 PM2013? We really don't have that kinda time left. My calculations don't go beyond 5.21.11.
So your research is moot.
Posted by Amos at August 20, 2008 07:40 PMThe mean lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is far longer than 100 years, it's thousands. To get the excess carbon out of the atmosphere, it has to go into other reservoirs: the ocean, soils, and vegetation are the options relevant to us. On short time scales, the biosphere can be important but there is an upper limit to this uptake and on longer time scales, centuries to millennia, the ocean uptake dominates. The rate at which the ocean removes CO2 from the atmosphere is not constant in time (it depends on ocean chemistry and the nature of sea floor sediments) and has a very long tail (10's of thousands of years).
The basic issue is that anthropogenic burning of fossil carbon creates a large, rapid "perturbation" to the atmosphere. Other components of the climate system have to change in order to respond to that purturbation and those processes take time. The typical back-of-the-envelope lifetime calculations are not relevant because they assume equilibrium, which in this case is quite incorrect.
David Archer, a professor at my alma matter, has authored and co-authored a few papers on this topic, look here for the primary literature.
Posted by Christina at August 20, 2008 11:40 PMwhoops, alma mater
Posted by Christina at August 20, 2008 11:43 PMWhat interesting and important work, Christina. I hope the science you all do will help us get some answers to what we need to do and how fast. And then I hope we find the will to do what is needed.
Posted by Mary at August 21, 2008 12:32 AMToo interesting. Thanks, Christina.
Posted by Sharkbabe at August 21, 2008 04:47 AMThank you, Christina, for this important work! It gets more urgent by the day.
Posted by iamcoyote at August 21, 2008 05:23 AMWell, we just passed the peak ice melt point for the year and this year the Northern Hemisphere Ice Extent is the largest of the last four years. What have we done to achieve this result?
Posted by peter at August 21, 2008 10:13 AMThat's variability, Peter. Here's the complete satellite record from 1979 onward, with some nifty tools for viewing sea ice data sets in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
Posted by Christina at August 21, 2008 11:30 AM