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.
Wasn’t there a recent paper from Bristol universtity that came to the opposite conclusion, that the absorbtion of CO2 has been increasing steadily?
This new paper claims proudly to be based on measurements. I’m not sure what measurements and how, but the only measurement that matters is what’s happening in the atmosphere. So far, the amount of CO2 sequestered is increasing year on year to maintain a constant fraction of the CO2 humans emit.
Looks like the same old….perhaps we have an interesting subject, but I must say at the end AGW is god or I wont get paid.
This is not science…it carrot on a stick.
Lubos Motl
you say Man emits the equivalent of 3.9 ppm of CO2 per year.
Now if Henry’s law works, then we should see a rise in atmospheric CO2 in the order of 1/50 x 3.9 = 0.078 ppm/yr due to man.
But, we see an actual rise of around 2.4 ppm, so 2.322 ppm must come from natural sources.
My money is on the oceans outgassing as a result of slight warming, possibly at depth.
And, as we are told that Co2 increases lag surface temperature rises by about 800 years, then perhaps we are looking at the effect of the medieval warming period.
(…. and if the numbers stack up, we could see another good reason to suppress that historic warming period)
Alexander Harvey (03:31:43) :
“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 agree with this. There is some very wooly thinking in this study.
First, the statement “slowdown in the oceans’ ability to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere” sounds almost anthropomorphic – the oceans have ability to do things like people. For people doing this study who are primarily politicians, not scientists, this is understandable.
The language is dumbed-down for greater political effect, at the expense of loss of clarity, confusion and ambiguity.
The word “slowdown” suggests that some properties of the ocean are changing due to CO2. The solubility? Capacity? This is confused thinking. Seawater has a certain CO2 solubility and capacity at all temperatures from 0-100C: this can be measured as a curve and is a property of seawater. This property does not change. The laws of physics and chemistry do not change with changing atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Furthermore, as is so often the case in AGW alarmist activist “science”, what is presented as experimental data turns out to be a hybrid of read data and mathematical modelling:
“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, …”
This trick of presenting as data what is in the end a model prediction is a common one in AGW literature.
Of course the conclusions of the paper and the language and tone of the paper are intended to convey a sense of crisis, that even though the poor old oceans are doing the best they can, they are in a beleagured state and approaching CO2 fatigue, and cant prevent CO2 in the air or water reaching crisis levels, which will wipe out calcified marine life such as corals and calcified plankton, not to mention causing run-away atmospheric heating. All very gloomy stuff.
The “ability” (so to speak) of living organisms to calcify their tissue evolved in the sea during the Cambrian explosion (if you exclude the previous “small shelly fauna”). Tissue calcification is done by many groups of marine organisms from fish to molluscs, crustaceans and also single celled plankton, as well as sessile organisms notably corals. This whole ensemble of calcified organisms has flourished continuously (punctuated by mass extinctions followed by rapid recovery) over the half billion years from then to now. During this period the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has fluctuated and has sometimes been up to 10 times higher than today for tens of millions of years.
What happened during those periods such as (if I remember rightly) in the Triassic with many times more CO2 in the atmosphere than now. Was seawater like lemonade? Could you see bubbles rising from it all the time – was the pH 2-3? Did all biological calcium in the sea dissolve? And did the earths surface become for tens of millions of years like Venus (then later somehow recover)?
None of these historic implications are explored nor indeed have they likely even crossed the minds of these somewhat uncurious authors.
How will the oceans “respond” to the current increasing levels of atmospheric CO2? Answer – in the same way that they always have in the past. We may not know exactly what that response was. But the response clearly did not include anything especially harmful for life in the seas or on land.
If the study is or influenced by GISS, it should be scrutinized very carefully.
Since Hansen works at Columbia, it should be doubly suspicious.
The numbers do not add up, and anyone talking about the oceans ‘acidifying’ is already misleading people.
Is there some sort of carbon crisis/climate conference in the offing?
DaveE.
I find it amazing that the oceans can distinguish man made CO2 from natural CO2.
RobJM (23:36:57) : 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.
Clearly we’re not ‘at equilibrium’. Isn’t that the whole point? We’re pumping CO2 into the atmosphere *much* faster than it can be absorbed by natural sinks. We’ve increased atmospheric CO2 by nearly 40% in (say) the last 200 years, and it’s been accelerating. What mechanism is suddenly going to kick in to make the other 60% take 5,000 years?
Philip_B (23:38:03) : 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.
Atmospheric CO2 level affects atmospheric temperature (greenhouse effect).
Atmospheric temperature affects ocean temperature.
Ocean temperature affects atmospheric CO2 level (feedback).
Is any of that hard to accept?
Good grief. The oceans regulate climate by “absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air.” Funny, I thought they did it via absorbing energy from the sun and re-radiating it in varying intensities manifested by the PDO, AMO, and the thermohaline current. Silly me. The oceans apparently have struggled mightily all these years to take in our evil “Carbon”, but now are exhausted. The plants have stepped up valiantly to do their dirty work, but can’t be counted upon forever. Presumably, they will become exhausted too at some point.
It’s a shame this sort of codswallop is what passes for science nowadays.
Phlogiston (04:55:28) : First, the statement “slowdown in the oceans’ ability to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere” sounds almost anthropomorphic
…
The word “slowdown” suggests that some properties of the ocean are changing due to CO2.
If you read the article above it talks about the “proportion declining” and says “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%.”
I think that’s fairly clear – the oceans are absorbing more anthropogenic CO2 than ever before in terms of tonnage but it’s becoming a smaller proportion of the total as time goes on.
RobJM (23:36:57) :
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.
Chemistry is apparently foreign to you since you think that Henry’s law applies to CO2 in the ocean!
Another BBC Alarmist page. Slight thread diversion…….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8367039.stm
Where do these celebs get their information?
Poor logic on this paper. Just because the land is absorbing more carbon doesn’t mean the capacity of the oceans is decreasing. Human emitted carbon happens primarily over land, so land processes are getting first crack at absorbing it, leaving less of the total to the oceans to absorb.
hunter (05:31:23) : I find it amazing that the oceans can distinguish man made CO2 from natural CO2.
They don’t. No-one claims they do. That’s what *we* have to do. It’s in the article cited, here:
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2586
“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.”
Rom (01:22:10)
nice one, most don’t realise how much water there really is on this planet, but, if you have a globe (world map) and take it out of its mount and turn it so as the Antarctic is facing you, now tell me that we have land on earth. Its all water.
Dear supercritical,
I am afraid that your assumption that the oceans will always hold 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere is only true at extremely long timescales that are needed for the gas to penetrate to the deep ocean, which may be thousands of years.
At shorter timescales closer to a decade or a century, only the upper or extreme upper portion of the ocean is relevant, and this object only contains roughly the same amount of CO2 as the atmosphere, so it absorbs about 1/2 of the emissions.
Of course I agree that in the extremely long run, the actual rise in the atmosphere will be negligible because the oceans return us to the equilibrium value that will only be raised by 1/50 of our future emissions from the present values. At the very end, 49/50 of the added CO2 will drop to the ocean while 1/50 will stay in the atmosphere.
But it will take thousands of years for this equilibrium to be reached. Before it is reached, only the atmosphere and the very upper ocean will see elevated CO2 concentrations while the deep ocean will be largely unchanged.
Best wishes
Lubos
This comment is somewhat on topic, but more related to yesterday’s post:
CO2 still going up, but temperature not following the same trend
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/co2-still-going-up-but-temperature-not-following-the-same-trend/#more-12902
I just wanted to share an “Aha” moment I had yesterday. For a while I’ve been wondering why my best regression against total CO2 PPM was using a 3rd order polynomial. Then yesterday I saw the above post discussing a “paper – by scientists from the internationally respected climate research group, the Global Carbon Project (GCP)”.
The links led me to the following:
Powerpoint:
http://www.aussmc.org/documents/Raupach.CarbonCycle.V01.pdf
Carbon Budget Data:
http://lgmacweb.env.uea.ac.uk/lequere/co2/carbon_budget.htm
On page 13 of the Powerpoint they show the graph “Fraction of CO2 emissions remaining in the atmosphere”. This graph showed the fraction going from 40% to 45% between 1959 and 2008. It also stated that it is likely to increase another 5% over the next 50 years. This meant that they were using a linear regression to model the change in percentage.
As seen in the data file, the growth in CO2 emissions is also of a linear nature. My “Aha” moment was that the growth in CO2 concentration is the product of two linear equations which is a second order polynomial. If we take the integral of this we get a third order polynomial, which is the area under the curve, which is the total CO2 in the atmosphere.
Next I regressed the Mauna Loa annual CO2 PPM growth rates and Carbon Budget Data’s (CBD) atmospheric CO2 GTon growth rates. As suspected, these are highly correlated with 1 PPM ~ 2 GTon and the intercept near zero. Not surprising as the GCP’s data is probably derived from the Mauna Loa data. I just wanted to confirm the relationship.
I then regressed the annual mean PPM’s for 1959-2008 against x^3, x^2, and x, with x=0 at 1959. The hindcasting skill of the model was great with r2 = 0.999. One surprise was that the x^3 coefficient was negative, even after allowing for stdev. This could only be true if the CO2 fraction remaining in the atmosphere was trending negative, which was contrary to the GCP’s powerpoint. Looking back at the GCB’s data, however, the stdev was greater than the trend coefficient itself so it is entirely possible.
Do I personally believe that the fraction trend is negative. Maybe. In the universe of all plausibilities, I believe this to be as plausible as the atmospheric trend being positive. You would have to believe, however, that the growth in the growth of atmospheric CO2 will at some point turn negative, which seems counter-intuitive. It could be true if the land sink’s portion is increasing greater than the ocean sink’s decrease. My guess is that at some point the fraction will be constant, but what that fraction might be is anybody’s guess.
Aren’t regressions fun? One can look at the same set of data and reach the opposite conclusion of someone else. Even an “internationally respected climate research group”. More fruit for the bakery, I guess.
Phillip Bratby (23:14:46) :
“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?
Great point. If it went from 8.3 to 8.2 Ph, it is slightly less alkaline. I presented this in the form of a question on Climate Progress when they had a rant about the highly acidic oceans and the question was deleted. I merely asked what would be acid neutral and what was the average ph of the ocean. They do not allow questions which call for facts in the answers.
Luboš Motl (01:47:16) :
I think this very parameterization and methodology of the “airborne fraction” and the fraction that is being absorbed is incorrect.
The increase in plant growth in response to increasing [CO2] is enhanced by increasing global precipitation in response to increasing temps. Who says warmer is bad?
Icarus (05:45:27) :
Clearly we’re not ‘at equilibrium’. Isn’t that the whole point? We’re pumping CO2 into the atmosphere *much* faster than it can be absorbed by natural sinks. We’ve increased atmospheric CO2 by nearly 40% in (say) the last 200 years, and it’s been accelerating. What mechanism is suddenly going to kick in to make the other 60% take 5,000 years?
Since CO2 is beneficial to plant growth and warming temperatures increase precipitation, then I hope there is no mechanism. And I’m unconcerned about sea level, polar bears, and glaciation.
Somewhat OT. Thomas L Friedman has gone off again, “What They Really Believe”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/opinion/18friedman.html
“If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.”
“But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.”
Isn’t calumny wonderful?
I see a bright, green crap table in the middle of this enormous casino; around its thick, rich polished sides stand rows of spectators, all eyes on the passionate thrower at the player’s end of the field.
To his left is the steely-eyed keeper-of-the-game, handing out a seemingly endless stack of chips to the sweaty-browed player casting his dice as fast as his free hand can sling, while the other claw doubles down on every bet — taking time only to scribble another IOU to add to the growing pile.
He is the passionate ‘warmist’ come to play his final game, and the stakes are the house.
The fascinated spectators grow in number, knowing the very floor where they stand depends on the luck of the throw:
Will they walk away or will they tear down the house?
Most of the CO2 on the planet comes from the ocean. While the ocean creates vast percentages of CO2, it also by photosynthesis creates oxygen and plant life.
How do we know what % of the CO2 in the ocean came from our air and what part came from decay of dead plant and animal life in the water?
Lubos Motl,
I have difficulty in believing that the upper portion of the ocean is somehow ‘saturated’ as you claim, when Henry’s law postulates that it is the partial pressure that drives the absorbtion. So, if the partial pressure of CO2 is seen to have increased by 3ppmv, then the equivalent of 50X this amount will have been absorbed.
Can you explain why Henry’s law somehow gets suspended in the conditions we are talking about?
And just to forestall claims that “things are not in equilibrium because it takes a long time for Henry’s Law absorbtion/outgassing to happen” … it seems to work pretty quickly enough for the fizzy-drink bottling industry. So if possible I’d like to know if there are any experimental values for the absorbtion rates of CO2 in water.
To see if the general undestanding of Henry’s law is ‘as advertised’, here is a thought-quiz that should settle the question;
In our lab, we have a closed pressure vessel fitted with a pipe outlet at the top, connected to a pressure gauge and then an inlet valve. We fill the vessel with water almost to the top, leaving a 1 litre gap which we fill with CO2 gas at 1 atmosphere. We close the valve.
1. After a while, we look at the guage.
a) What will it read?
b) How long does it take to stabilise?
2. We open the valve to the atmosphere. What happens?
We empty the pressure vessel and start again from scratch with a fresh filling of water. This time, we want to increase the CO2 pressure in the 1 litre gap so that the guage reads a steady, stable 2 Atmospheres.
3. How many litres of CO2 will we have to use?