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Past Climate Implies Higher Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels in the Future
A new perspective has been published in the journal Science entitled: ‘Illuminating the Modern Dance of Climate and CO2.’
The paper states:
Climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have been coupled through much of Earth’s history: CO2 influences climate through the greenhouse effect, but climate also influences CO2 through its impact on the stores of carbon on the land and in the oceans. This two-way coupling between climate and CO2 will have a large influence on how the climate changes over the course of the 21st century. Currently, the amount of CO2 emitted as a result of human activities is about double the amount required to explain the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 (1). The remainder is absorbed by land and ocean carbon sinks, which have thus been acting to slow climate change. Will they continue to do so? Data on the Earth’s past can illuminate this modern dance of climate and CO2.
And concludes:
The Little Ice Age (LIA) data imply that atmospheric CO2 will increase more quickly with global warming than most models suggest. One implication is that the 20th-century CO2 rise due to anthropogenic emissions may have been amplified by 20 to 30 ppmv through the impacts of global warming on natural carbon sinks. Furthermore, the existence of a strong climate effect on the carbon cycle indicates that larger emissions cuts are required to stabilize CO2 concentrations at a given level. The LIA is just one example of a natural climatic anomaly in the past that can provide insights into the strength of the coupling between the Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. Paleoclimatic data cannot tell us how to meet the challenge of managing 21st-century climate change, but they can help us to better understand the nature of this challenge.
October 9th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
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