While this article makes a strong case, looking at SST and CO2 can also be revealing:
A review of this WUWT post might also be instructive: A look at human CO2 emissions -vs- ocean absorption
From Columbia University: Oceans’ Uptake of Manmade Carbon May be Slowing
First Year-by-Year Study, 1765-2008, Shows Proportion Declining
(Click on image to view larger version)
Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and land (green). The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion.
Credit: Samar Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The oceans play a key role in regulating climate, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air. Now, the first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era suggests the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions—a finding with potentially wide implications for future climate. The study appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, and is expanded upon in a separate website.
The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%.
Some climate models have already predicted such a slowdown in the oceans’ ability to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere, but this is the first time scientists have actually measured it. Models attribute the change to depletion of ozone in the stratosphere and global warming-induced shifts in winds and ocean circulation. But the new study suggests the slowdown is due to natural chemical and physical limits on the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon—an idea that is now the subject of widespread research by other scientists.
“The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO₂” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Because of this chemical effect, over time, the ocean is expected to become a less efficient sink of manmade carbon. The surprise is that we may already be seeing evidence for this, perhaps compounded by the ocean’s slow circulation in the face of accelerating emissions.”
The study reconstructs the accumulation of industrial carbon in the oceans year by year, from 1765 to 2008. Khatiwala and his colleagues found that uptake rose sharply in the 1950s, as the oceans tried to keep pace with the growth of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Emissions continued to grow, and by 2000, reached such a pitch that the oceans have since absorbed a declining overall percentage, even though they absorb more each year in absolute tonnage. Today, the oceans hold about 150 billion tons of industrial carbon, the researchers estimate–a third more than in the mid-1990s.
For decades, scientists have tried to estimate the amount of manmade carbon absorbed by the ocean by teasing out the small amount of industrial carbon—less than 1 percent—from the enormous background levels of natural carbon. Because of the difficulties of this approach, only one attempt has been made to come up with a global estimate of how much industrial carbon the oceans held—for a single year, 1994.
Khatiwala and his colleagues came up with another method. Using some of the same data as their predecessors— seawater temperatures, salinity, manmade chlorofluorocarbons and other measures—they developed a mathematical technique to work backward from the measurements to infer the concentration of industrial carbon in surface waters, and its transport to deep water through ocean circulation. This allowed them to reconstruct the uptake and distribution of industrial carbon in the oceans over time.
Their estimate of industrial carbon in the oceans in 1994—114 billion tons—nearly matched the earlier 118 billion-ton estimate, made by Chris Sabine, a marine chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization in a 2004 paper in the journal Science.
Sabine, who was not involved in the new study, said he saw some limitations. For one, he said, the study assumes circulation has remained steady, along with the amount of organic matter in the oceans. “That being said, I still think this is the best estimate of the time variance of anthropogenic CO₂ in the ocean available,” said Sabine. “Our previous attempts to quantify anthropogenic CO₂ using ocean data have only been able to provide single snapshots in time.”
About 40 percent of the carbon entered the oceans through the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, because carbon dioxide dissolves more readily in cold, dense seawater than in warmer waters. From there, currents transport the carbon north. “We’ve suspected for some time that the Southern Ocean plays a critical role in soaking up fossil fuel CO₂,” said Khatiwala. “But our study is the first to quantify the importance of this region with actual data.
The researchers also estimated carbon uptake on land, by taking the known amount of fossil-fuel emissions and subtracting the oceans’ uptake and the carbon left in the air. They were surprised to learn that the land may now be absorbing more than it is giving off.
They say that until the 1940s, the landscape produced excess carbon dioxide, possibly due to logging and the clearing and burning of forests for farming. Deforestation and other land-use changes continue at a rapid pace today—but now, each year the land appears to be absorbing 1.1 billion tons more carbon than it is giving off.
One possible reason for the reversal, say the researchers, is that now, some of the extra atmospheric carbon—raw material for photosynthesis–may be feeding back into living plants and making them grow faster. “The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be providing a fertilizing effect,” said study coauthor Timothy Hall, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Many other scientists are now working to determine the possible effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant growth, and incorporate these into models of past and future climates.
Khatiwala says there are still large uncertainties, but in any case, natural mechanisms cannot be depended upon to mitigate increasing human-produced emissions. “What our ocean study and other recent land studies suggest is that we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past, and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels,” he said.
In a related paper in Nature, Khatiwala describes how the research was done.
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Hmmm…. do they account for the disappearance of large swaths of rain forest in the green line? Seems those are large hungry plants…
“The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO₂” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
That comment is a lie. The ocean is currently alkali and is becoming less alkali but no where near acidic.
“The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO₂”. If the ocean is alkaline, not acidic, how can it be made more acidic?
“…they developed a mathematical technique to work backward from the measurements to infer the concentration of industrial carbon in surface waters…”
Oh boy.
In other news, no bristlecone pines live in saltwater, so maybe there is a chance they are correct about CO2 absorption.
Here’s another scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies studying the Earth. Does NASA study space anymore? If not, shouldn’t it be renamed?
Well, I haven’t read the full paper. But talk of the oceans “struggling to keep up” with rising emissions, whilst reckoning that a ginormous 1% of the CO2 in the oceans is “industrial” leads me to think I’ve probably better things to do.
And I see they are trotting out the fashionable ‘acid’ oceans scare, as well. Apart from in close proximity to volcanic underwater vents (such as around Ischia, where kind UK licence payers send BBC “environMental” reporters for a touch of scuba diving), is there any record of ocean pH values even approaching 7.0 ? Anywhere?
Back to your X-boxes fellas and go dream up another ‘reconstruction’.
The ocean holds 50 times the CO2 that the atmosphere does as described by henry’s law. To double the Atmospheric CO2 you have to double the total CO2 in both the atmosphere and the oceans. At the present rate of emission that should take about 5000 years. This is why they lie about the lifetime in the atmosphere, because 49 out of 50 parts of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere will be happily be dissolved into the ocean at equilibrium.(assuming constant temp) Of course chemistry is foreign to these folk or they would have realised there is an unlimited supply of carbonate rock exposed to the ocean that will buffer against pH changes.
If AGW turns out to be false then this is a great argument for not worrying about non warming aspects of CO2.
The first graph, which I presume is not part of the study, says either,
Atmospheric CO2 levels determine SSTs
or,
SSTs determine atmospheric CO2 levels.
Both of which are hard to accept. A puzzle.
“The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%.”
How does the ocean know to discriminate against fossil-fuel CO2 instead of forest fire CO2?
I do not understand the first pink graph. What sense has to use “moving average” for X and Y axis values for constructing such graph? For me the graphs shows that rising atmospheric CO2 is a result of degassing of warmer water.
This (the posted part – I have not ready the full study) completely fails to consider the absorption of carbon in increased plant growth (due to increased food).
I would also love to see this compared with the ‘natural’ CO2 cycle!
Oh dear use of the green function suggest correct boundary problems solutions which transfers the boundary Value problem(bvp) to an initial value problem (ivp)
eg Ghandouri,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2100174
This requires a significant set of temporal measurements at the quantum and molecular interface, such as the geometry and size of the taxa say for phytoplakton eg
Changes in the Global Carbon Cycle: Evidence from the Measurements of O2/N2 in the Atmosphere and CO2 Partial Pressure at the Ocean–Atmosphere Boundary
V. G. Gorshkov and A. M. Makar’eva
Abstract
—The global carbon budget includes inorganic and organic constituents. The rates of fossil fuel combustion and inorganic carbon accumulation in the atmosphere and the ocean are known. The organic constituents include changes in the abundance of organic matter in ocean and land areas. Proceeding from changes in CO2 content and O2/N2 concentration ratio in the atmosphere and the known stoichiometric proportions of oxygen binding at organic matter decomposition, changes in the masses of organic substances were quantified in terrestrial and marine environments. The resulting values of organic constituents of the carbon budget are consistent with independent estimates based on the data on anthropogenic land cultivation and the concentration ratio 14C/12C in the dissolved organic carbon of the ocean. We took into account an increase with time in the rate of concentration changes of dissolved inorganic carbon in the ocean inferred from 13C/12C
measurements.Profiles were constructed for changes in CO2 partial pressure and
d13C through the atmosphere–ocean boundary, which correspond to the obtained values of the total carbon uptake by the ocean in inorganic and organic forms.
Concludes
: The traditional estimates of carbon flux on the basis of measurements of the difference of CO2 partial pressures and d13C in the atmosphere and the surface mixed oceanic layer do not account for the biotic changes in the profiles of CO2 and d13C in the microscopic nearsurface layer. This results in contradictions between the changes in the concentration of dissolved organic and inorganic carbon in the ocean calculated from measured 13C/12C and 14C/12C values. Accounting for carbon absorption by marine biota reveals small extrema of pCO2 and d13C at microscopic distances from the interface boundary comparable with the size of phytoplankton cells. The existence of these extrema, which are difficult to detect, eliminates the contradictions between the results obtained by various techniques for
the determination of atmospheric carbon uptake by the ocean. The necessary magnitudes of the extrema are attained if 5% of oceanic gross primary production is
produced by phytoplankton cells in direct contact with the interface boundary. This is consistent with the observed distribution of the phytoplankton biomass
with depth in the euphotic layer of the ocean
http://www.bioticregulation.ru/index.php
The absence of said measurements is a second law violation eg Morowitz
: Abstract Cartesian mind body dualism and modern versions of this viewpoint posit a mind thermodynamically unrelated to the body but informationally interactive. The relation between information and entropy developed by Leon Brillouin demonstrates that any information about the state of a system has entropic consequences. It is therefore impossible to dissociate the mind’s information from the body’s entropy. Knowledge of that state of the system without an energetically significant measurement would lead to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
:
Another modeller …. Science is not Cookery
Well, I certainly blew that post.
Being an old country farmer who after close to three quarters of a century on this rock has developed a very skeptical bent and also being very mathematically challenged amongst the very erudite denizens of this blog, for my simplistic old farmer’s mind there are quite a few problems with the claims in this above paper.
The world’s ocean volumes are given at somewhere over 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water.
The water in each one of those cubic kilometres weighs in at, for simplicity sake, more than a thousand million tonnes; ie; a billion tonnes of ocean water in each of those cubic kilometres.
Now this is simplistic in the extreme!
The Columbia University researchers claim that the oceans absorbed some 2.3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually or a mass of CO2 that equals the mass of just 2.3 cubic kilometres of ocean water out of all that 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean water.
And that is a very serious situation??
I must try that one on my bank manager sometime when comparing my lack of financial assets to the financial assets of one of the “big four” banks here in Australia!
Now I know that the distribution of the CO2 absorption areas of the oceans is highly variable and only occurs at the ocean surface.
But there is another factor that those who never deal with anything biological will more often than not overlook.
Plants love CO2 and wheat, one of the wold’s major food grain crops gives it’s highest yields at around 700 ppm of CO2 so we still have a long way to go to improve wheat yields by possibly another 15% or 20% just by raising atmospheric CO2 levels to 700 ppm.
CO2 Science has a whole set of data tables on this; http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/photo/photo_subject.php
The plant world of the oceans include truly enormous tonnages of Algae and other plant type animals who like all plants use CO2 as a part and parcel of the photosynthetic process.
I have yet to find estimates of algae and other ocean plant tonnages, their CO2 absorption rates, their growth rates and mass tonnage changes with increased or decreased ocean CO2, or the path of the CO2 as the plants are eaten or die and slowly disperse down into the deep oceans even while acting as an enormous food source for the myriad small creatures of the ocean food chain.
I have read some articles on this algal food chain and some on the possible path that absorbed CO2 follows in small shelled sea creatures but information on algal and other ocean plant growth due to increased ocean absorbed CO2 just does not seem to exist.
Nobody seems to take account of this universal ocean biological CO2 absorption / plant growth process or seems to have tried to assess the effects of increasing CO2 levels on the ocean biology.
And that regular annual variation if the CO2 levels could very easily be just the changes in the ocean’s algal and plant life as the seasons wax and wane and the ocean surface temperatures rise and fall with the seasons and the ocean plant life, booms, busts and dies.
Who would know as the relatively unexplored oceans cover close to 80% of the globe’s surface and the great Southern Ocean and the southern most parts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans have barely been touched let alone researched down to the levels of assessing the long term cycles and levels of ocean plant life activity.
And that annual CO2 variation at all the main global CO2 measuring stations may even have a simple way of checking the source of the CO2 variations.
Way back in 1963 experiments were held to see if Algae could be used as an O2 generator in submarines when supplied with CO2 and sufficient light and etc.
“Gas Exchange with Mass Cultures of Algae”
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/11/5/450.pdf
Simply measuring any changes in the O2 levels captured in the same CO2 measuring flasks at stations such as Mauna Loa might just show that there is a close correlation between the atmospheric levels of the two gases and if that is the case then the seasonal swings of the oceans are more than likely to be the reason for the annual swing in measured CO2 levels.
Well the oceans would be taking up less for the time being due to generally warmer ocean surfaces over the past 150 years or so than were experienced during the Little Ice Age.
However the IPCC seems to accept that the human influence was not significant until mid 20th Century so how do they explain the longer term trend ?
The ocean surfaces seem to warm and cool over centuries on their own independent time scales, probably via several overlapping cycles.
Warm oceans take up less CO2, cool oceans take up more CO2. What is there to cause the current panic ?
Even the CO2 base level is in question due to the change from chemical methods of measurement to the current systems.
There is considerable doubt about the reliability of ice core proxies for longer term past levels of CO2 in the air.
What we need to see is the change in the trend of CO2 amounts in the air when ocean surfaces cool again but that is going to take decades even if we are now past the peak of the oceanic cycles and that is not yet certain.
I see nothing but panic stricken conclusions based on wholly inadequate data.
OK. As far as the ‘A look at human CO2 emissions -vs- ocean absorption’ post is concerned, I have some qualms, which were expressed by others, notably (and a bit caustically) JamesG (05:18:37).
According to the writer’s self-admittedly simple model, the steady state flux of CO2 from the planet is essentially 0.0215 * 285 = 6 ppm, whereas his annual emissions are 1.5-4.5 ppm, or roughly 50%. I have always read that anthropogenic emissions are more on the order of 1-4% of the total.
This is the biggest problem I have accepting the assertion that manmade CO2 is responsible for the atmospheric increase of the past 50-odd years – the increase due to anthropogenic forcing in a closed loop system like this really ought to be less percentage-wise than the greatest percentage of yearly forcing, or at least, not much more for a reasonably behaved climated system. Until someone can show me with rigorous mathematics a reason that the marginal sensitivity for the anthropogenic forcing should be so much greater than the average sensitivity for the natural forcing, I will continue to have doubts.
I also read with interest some of the other commenters who offered a variety of reasons that the CO2 record may not be entirely trustworthy. My wariness regarding proxy measurements of more than a half centrury ago, which may or may not be well founded, is this: resolution. All sensing devices are band-limited. Some still have very wide bandwidths, but nevertheless, they all have some limit. Time and entropy also tend to degrade materials, soften edges, and remove high frequency content. The warming we have seen recently is really just a blip in geologic time. Do such blips really have time to become fixated in the geologic record, and remain so throughout the ages of storage? Might what is seen in certain repositories, such as ice cores, essentially be low pass filtered versions of reality, in which such blips would essentially be flattened out?
Into this contemplation stepped Dave Middleton (07:34:58), who noted that studies of Plant Stomatal Index indicate far greater variation in historic CO2 concentrations. Does anyone out there have any recent news of where such studies stand?
As for the current post… eh? Looks like they found what they were looking for.
I think this very parameterization and methodology of the “airborne fraction” and the fraction that is being absorbed is incorrect.
What do you think would happen with the CO2 concentrations in 10 years if we abruptly stopped all man-made CO2 emissions tomorrow?
Well, today, we emit roughly 3.9 ppm worth of CO2 a year. But the concentration (now at 388 ppm) doesn’t increase by 3.9 ppm a year but by 1.8 ppm only. So someone must eat the remaining 2.1 ppm, to match the observed CO2 with the known CO2 emissions. It’s clearly mostly oceans and forests, but add anyone else whom you like. They are eating the CO2 because they’re encouraged to do so, by the enhanced CO2 concentration above 280 ppm, not because we want them to absorb some quotas from our emissions. They don’t really care where the CO2 comes from.
What would happen if the emissions stopped? I think it’s obvious that the oceans and forests would still absorb approximately 2.1 ppm, and the concentration would therefore drop by 2.1 ppm, at least for many years. How could it not? The rate how much CO2 is being swallowed by a tree can only be affected by the local observables – such as the local CO2 concentration – and it can’t be affected by our CO2 emissions during the last year. The tree doesn’t read newspapers to learn about our emissions, in order to adjust its growth rate. The tree’s growth rate is given by the local temperature and CO2 concentration, among other things, and because those change just a little bit every year, it’s clear that the trees and oceans will subtract 2.1 ppm from the atmosphere even if the emissions stop abruptly.
So the CO2 absorbed by the oceans and forests should be parameterized as the fraction of the deviation of the current CO2 concentration from the 280 ppm value (now the difference is about 108 ppm, and 2 percent of this difference is being liquidated by the extra natural absorption every year), where 280 ppm is calculable as the equilibrium concentration for the modern temperature (which haven’t changed since 1800 in any way that would significantly influence these calculations).
Of course, because the CO2 emissions were approximately growing exponentially since 1800, with some pretty constant rate, the deviation of “C” from 280ppm grew exponentially, too – with the same rate. So in the long run, it doesn’t really matter whether we compute the expected absorption as a percentage of the annual emissions, or percentage of the deviation of C from 280 ppm.
But for any imbalance, rapid enough change of the exponential growth of the CO2 emissions or its rate, it matters a lot how you calculate these things, and the correct method is to calculate the expected CO2 absorption as a multiple of (C-280 ppm). Because they don’t seem to do this basic point right, I won’t read the paper.
I put to thee these questions three:
Question One: How is CO2 measured?
Question Two: Where is CO2 measured?
Question Three: By whom is CO2 measured?
I just want know.
Antony,
E.G. Beck and Dr. F. Massen made a paper,
“Accurate estimation of CO2 background level from near ground measurements at non-mixed environments”
link:
http://www.klima2009.net/de/papers/4/6
– a way to better use historical local COO measurements.
Interesting paper
Personally, I find the use of the proportion of annual CO2 emissions taken up by the environment a pretty useless and probably misleading statistic.
I suggest that everyone refers back to the “A look at human CO2 emissions -vs- ocean absorption” link provided.
The rate of up take is closely related to the time integral of the of the (emission rate – up take rate), giving the degree of imbalance. If we held emissions constant (zero annual increase) the up take rate would take years to go down (half live ~50 years (ocean proportion only)) so the up take proportion ratio would become infinite.
For the up take proportion to be meaningful one would have to look at timescales greater than about 50 years. Also of note is the short (geologically) time scale of the CO2 excess, in truth there is a much longer time constant required to finally purge the CO2 from the atmosphere/ocean/biosphere by geological processes and that does indeed have a geological time scale.
Alex
The reco very rate
I did that too quickly it should of course read if we held Total Aggregate Emissions constant (i.e) annual emissions zero, not something that we are likely to do, but it illustrates the point.
Alex
But we know the uptake rate is a lot quicker. When SE Asia caught fire in the early ’90s the smoke could be seen from space. That year there was a blip at Mauna Loa’s CO2 station, but gone within less than 5 years.