Readers may recall these WUWT stories: Earth’s biosphere booming, California’s giant redwoods inconveniently respond to increased carbon dioxide, and Forget deforestation: The world’s woodland is getting denser and change could help combat climate change. NASA satellite imagery pointed this out long ago.
Now confirmation from another source: From the University of Colorado at Boulder
Earth absorbing more carbon, even as CO2 emissions rise, says CU-Boulder-led study
Planet’s carbon uptake doubles in past 50 years, researchers ponder how long trend can continue
Despite sharp increases in carbon dioxide emissions by humans in recent decades that are warming the planet, Earth’s vegetation and oceans continue to soak up about half of them, according to a surprising new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
The study, led by CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Ashley Ballantyne, looked at global CO2 emissions reports from the past 50 years and compared them with rising levels of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere during that time, primarily because of fossil fuel burning. The results showed that while CO2 emissions had quadrupled, natural carbon “sinks” that sequester the greenhouse gas doubled their uptake in the past 50 years, lessening the warming impacts on Earth’s climate.
“What we are seeing is that the Earth continues to do the heavy lifting by taking up huge amounts of carbon dioxide, even while humans have done very little to reduce carbon emissions,” said Ballantyne. “How long this will continue, we don’t know.”
A paper on the subject will be published in the Aug. 2 issue of Nature. Co-authors on the study include CU-Boulder Professor Jim White, CU-Boulder doctoral student Caroline Alden and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists John Miller and Pieter Tans. Miller also is a research associate at the CU-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
According to Alden, the trend of sinks gulping atmospheric carbon cannot continue indefinitely. “It’s not a question of whether or not natural sinks will slow their uptake of carbon, but when,” she said.
“We’re already seeing climate change happen despite the fact that only half of fossil fuel emissions stay in the atmosphere while the other half is drawn down by the land biosphere and oceans,” Alden said. “If natural sinks saturate as models predict, the impact of human emissions on atmospheric CO2 will double.”
Ballantyne said recent studies by others have suggested carbon sinks were declining in some areas of the globe, including parts of the Southern Hemisphere and portions of the world’s oceans. But the new Nature study showed global CO2 uptake by Earth’s sinks essentially doubled from 1960 to 2010, although increased variations from year-to-year and decade-to-decade suggests some instability in the global carbon cycle, he said.
White, who directs CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, likened the increased pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere to a car going full throttle. “The faster we go, the more our car starts to shake and rattle,” he said. “If we drive 100 miles per hour, it is going to shake and rattle a lot more because there is a lot more instability, so it’s probably time to back off the accelerator,” he said. “The same is true with CO2 emissions.”
The atmospheric CO2 levels were measured at 40 remote sites around the world by researchers from NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., including stations at the South Pole and on the Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii.
Carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere primarily by fossil fuel combustion and by forest fires and some natural processes, said Ballantyne. “When carbon sinks become carbon sources, it will be a very critical time for Earth,” said Ballantyne. “We don’t see any evidence of that yet, but it’s certainly something we should be looking for.”
“It is important to understand that CO2 sinks are not really sinks in the sense that the extra carbon is still present in Earth’s vegetation, soils and the ocean,” said NOAA’s Tans. “It hasn’t disappeared. What we really are seeing is a global carbon system that has been pushed out of equilibrium by the human burning of fossil fuels.”
Despite the enormous uptake of carbon by the planet, CO2 in the atmosphere has climbed from about 280 parts per million just prior to the Industrial Revolution to about 394 parts per million today, and the rate of increase is speeding up. The global average of atmospheric CO2 is expected to reach 400 ppm by 2016, according to scientists.
The team used several global CO2 emissions reports for the Nature study, including one by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. They concluded that about 350 billion tons of carbon — the equivalent of roughly 1 trillion tons of CO2 — had been emitted as a result of fossil fuel burning and land use changes from 1959 to 2010, with just over half moving into sinks on land or in the oceans.
According to the study, the scientists observed decreased CO2 uptake by Earth’s land and oceans in the 1990s, followed by increased CO2 sequestering by the planet from 2000 to 2010. “Seeing such variation from decade to decade tells us that we need to observe Earth’s carbon cycle for significantly longer periods in order to help us understand what is occurring,” said Ballantyne.
Scientists also are concerned about the increasing uptake of CO2 by the world’s oceans, which is making them more acidic. Dissolved CO2 changes seawater chemistry by forming carbonic acid that is known to damage coral, the fundamental structure of coral reef ecosystems that harbor 25 percent of the world’s fish species.
The study was funded by the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation and NOAA.
A total of 33.6 billion tons of CO2 were emitted globally in 2010, climbing to 34.8 billion tons in 2011, according to the International Energy Agency. Federal budget cuts to U.S. carbon cycle research are making it more difficult to measure and understand both natural and human influences on the carbon cycle, according to the research team.
“The good news is that today, nature is helping us out,” said White also a professor in CU’s geological sciences department. “The bad news is that none of us think nature is going to keep helping us out indefinitely. When the time comes that these carbon sinks are no longer taking up carbon, there is going to be a big price to pay.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Matt E says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:10 am
Increasing use of the hydrocarbon stocks leads to greater conversion to organic matter just as it did in the past when CO2 was higher, and organic matter covered more of the planet.
Take into consideration the time needed to reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere from 10-12x current to what it is today: tens of millions of years. Even the glacial-interglacial transitions needed some 5,000 years to increase CO2 with some 100 ppmv. We needed only 100 years to build that up…
There are different processes that can sequester CO2: several are very fast, but limited in capacity, others have huge capacities, but are much slower.
Take the ocean surface and the yearly seasonal growth and decay of leaves in vegetation: these are very fast (halve a year) to a few years (for the whole mixed layer in the oceans), but limited: most of what was sequestered comes back the same year in another season. The oceans mixed layer is limited for another reason too: for a 100% increase in the atmosphere, only 10% more is sequestered by the ocean surface, that is the buffer capacity which is working, but seawater is a weak buffer (a strong one would give a 100% increase).
Then we have the deep oceans and the more permanent storage in plants, both have a huge storage capacity (oceans) to unlimited (land plants), but both are much slower: plants don’t double their carbon sink capacity if CO2 doubles, the average is ~50%, in ideal circumstances, which don’t often exist in nature. And the exchange rate between the atmosphere and the deep oceans is limited.
The current real yearly sink rate for the different compartiments thus is ~10% in the ocean surface layer (measured at a few stations), ~15% in the biosphere (calculated from the oxygen use) and ~25% in the deep oceans (the difference). All other sinks are either too slow or too limited in capacity.
Where Pieter Tans is right is that what got into the more permanent storage may come back: even root systems may rotten over decades, only peat and (brown)coal would give a real permanent storage, if we didn’t use it… And deep oceans storage comes back too, even if it costs centuries…
Mike M says:
August 2, 2012 at 10:26 am
OT – Is it just me? I can’t view….
_______________________
I get the same access denied message. Guess they do not want the citizens who paid for the work picking through it and finding all their errors.
HenryP says:
August 2, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Henry says:
my question is: how much of that 70 ppm’s was due to natural warming?
For an increase of ~0.6°C over the past 50 years, the oceans are responsible for maximum 10 ppmv and probably halve of it, as vegetation was an increasing sink over the same period…
To prove that this is true watch the NOAA station (Burrow, Barrow?) that is monitoring CO2 in ALASKA: the CO2 has been flat there for quite some time.
Barrow still is strongly going up, despite flat temperatures since 2000, see:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/ and click on Barrow in the map.
And globally, the link between the emissions and the CO2 increase is much stronger than between temperature and CO2 increase, which even shows a negative correlation over the period 1945-1975:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_emiss_increase.jpg
Wow, comments growing quickly.
So they measured 40 locations and came to a giant conclusion. Guess I need to read the paper to see how those Forty (40) points are able to represent the whole earth.
Great comments.
As I sit here in Calgary, Alberta waiting for an appointment, it is 15 degrees C on August 2, 2012. The “normal” temperature is around 24 C. Where’s my global warming? I need to cut hay. Just kidding. Supposed to get back to “normal’ in a week. Seems like normal weather.
Slabadang said: 1) the Earth’s climate is a closed system;
2) nature wants to be in equilibrium and policies must aid that be they economic or climate or biodiversity (that one always seems to forget that wayward
1)
I don’t believe the Earth’s climate is a CLOSED system. We are shedding atmosphere all the time as we travel through space like a comet travelling toward the sun. The density of the atmosphere has gone down significantly since the days of flying dinosaurs according to those that study them who suggest they would not be able to fly in today’s atmosphere. We receive lots of space debris and radiation. We do not live in a closed system.
2)
Nature is never in equilibrium. Carnivores are always after the plant eaters upsetting the balance, the plant eaters are after plants, the plants need bacteria, viruses attack bacteria and other living things … there are volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, land slides, droughts … whatever scale you want to look at, there is never equilibrium. The old saying “Nature abhors a vacuum” applies. Even in chemistry, we only get “equilibrium” by controlling the environment around our experiment. Allow temperature, pressure or other parameters like varying gas concentrations to change and change occurs. La plus la change, la plus la meme chose.
Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2012 at 9:43 am
“Papers that start off with deliberately misleading statements like the above should not make it past the editor’s wastepaper basket. Universities that encourage this type of deceit should have their tax payer funds cut off and be publicly pilloried by the rest of the scientific community.”
My youngest son spent one semester in engineering at CU-Boulder, got a 4 point and transferred to another school of engineering due to the “cultural” situation he encountered among the other students. Being from a small town in WY he did not appreciate the “values” of the students there and knew immediately that he did not prefer to adapt. He graduated with honors from another university in Mech Eng. CU-Boulder is getting exactly what it caters to on the left end of the spectrum. I found this interesting as my experience in engineering school 40 years ago was that both students and faculty were fairly conservative, on the whole. The times they are a changin!
I Like “Burn Coal Save a Tree” for the bumpersticker.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says: @ur momisugly August 2, 2012 at 11:03 am
…..This is such a common arror against all logic under many sceptics…
True that humans emit only 3% of the natural emissions. But the natural carbon cycle is not only emissions, it is also sinks: and humans provide 0% of the natural sinks. Thus all what humans emit is additional and what nature emits is more than compensated by natural sinks. Against 97% natural emissions stands 98.5% natural sinks…
___________________________
First Geology shows the natural carbon cycle is not in equilibrium but is => zero CO2. The earth started out very high in CO2. Photosynthesis broke the molecule into C and O2. The O2 was released to the air and the C was laid down as coal, limestone, marble…. Humans are now releasing that stored CO2. (And if plants had voices they would be thanking us)
Humans are also increasing natural sinks through cultivating plant varieties for maximum growth, using fertilization and irrigation to turn marginal land into productive land, and replacing mature forests with high growth young forest that are much better carbon sinks.
By using modern methods we have gone from 100 bushels from 5 acres of wheat to 100 bushels from 3 acres of wheat,, From 100 bushels from 2-1/2 acres of corn to 100 bushels from 1-1/8 acres of corn. And from 100 pounds from 2/5 acre of lint cotton to a 100 pounds from 1/5 acre of lint cotton.
About 40% of the earth’s land is farmland with less than half that as cropland and the rest pasture according to University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists who used satellite data to determine where cultivation is occurring with good spatial accuracy. link
Given about 40% of the earth’s land is farmland and about 20 percent of arable land is irrigated (FAO), your second statement is wildly inaccurate. (World bank has 37.9% of land area under cultivation as 2009)
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
Y-Z = -4 GtC/year.
Thus the natural sinks were 4 GtC higher than the natural sources in the past year.
In 1960, the figures were 1 GtC sink capacity and 2 GtC emissions per year, see the forementioned link to the emissions/increase/sink rates over the past 50 years.
Since 8 is at most .05Y then the equation can be written
4 = 8+160-164
Z, the sinks, went from 160 to 164gtc per year. An increase of 2%… Nothing close to doubling.
Now, warmists want to claim that the system is nearing saturation and CANT absorb any more.
Plenty of experimental evidence and history to prove this fear irrational.
1) Green house at 1000ppm CO2 show plants grow much faster and bigger than they do at 380PPM so the plants are clearly NOT at their saturation capacity at 380ppm.
2) Simple experiments and well established fact that at 1000ppm more ,CO2 dissolves in water than at 380ppm. Stupid to say that if we release more CO2 in the air, the oceans wont absorb more.
3) Chemical kinetics. As CO2 concentration goes up, the conversion rate to carbonate also goes up.
It is quite obvious the systems abilty to respond is NOT MAXED out at current level of CO2.
Now, if you want to claim that we should be worried that if the oceans warm and no longer act as a sink and mass amounts of CO2 will be released… you should also consider:
1) If the oceans cool and our CO2 level drops, ( just barely above plant starvation level now) what will happen to life on earth?
2) Geologically speakinng, the earth is on the verge of entering another ice age. I think we should be more worried about that prospect since at 6000ppm life on earth was flourishing so not much to worry about on the high side. Any bets on how well life on earth is going to do with CO2<100ppm?
Pamela Gray says: @ur momisugly August 2, 2012 at 11:05 am
Maybe we should require scientists to spend 3 years working in private industry actually trying to make money prior to their placement in the Ivory Tower.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I will second that idea. If I recall correctly RIT insisted all their instructors have industrial experience in the 1970s. I took several courses there after I got my BS in Chemistry and all of them were very worthwhile and reality grounded. Some of the most worthwhile college courses I ever took.
Any day now Trenberth’s missing heat is going to suddenly show itself, and then you’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to us. Any day now Gaia is going to refuse to take up anymore excess CO2, and then you skeptics are going to be so sorry. Any day now the human population on this planet is going to reach a point where we can’t produce enough food to feed everyone — at least without additional CO2 to increase crop yields (oops, scratch that last part.)
Any day now people are going to wise up to the exaggerated claims of political activists masquerading as climate scientists. Then everyone will be sorry they wasted tax money on useless, self-serving propaganda peddled in the name of science.
I wonder what the equilibrium was when co2 level in the atmosphere was 10 times higher than today? How did the Earth get through this disaster.
Pssst. Greenhouse growers – 1,000ppm. 😉 Maybe we got some way to go yet.
Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2012 at 10:26 am
Very nice Gail I had not seen this before. Thanks for posting it.
When are Warmists going to accept that Co2 is plant food?
Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Given about 40% of the earth’s land is farmland and about 20 percent of arable land is irrigated (FAO), your second statement is wildly inaccurate. (World bank has 37.9% of land area under cultivation as 2009)
Gail, you forgot a few things:
– what humans are cultivating today was mostly occupied by nature before. In general, clearing forests for human/animal food/feed is a net CO2 source (especially for the root systems), at least in the first years.
– what humans are cultivating today is fast circulating back to the atmosphere directly by burning the rests, eating crops and seeds and exhaling CO2, or slower by composting, and dying…
The difference is that we are adding CO2 buried millions of years ago, the result of the high CO2 levels of that time, to the atmosphere of today. The addition is clear in the increase, the effect of the addition on climate is a complete separate discussion…
Why is it that every single press release from these goombas reads as if written by the same person? Or is that just me?
This is such a stupid paper. The biosphere absorbs 20 times more CO2 each year than mankind produces. Yet they are arguing that the biosphere will saturate?
If nature stopped emitting 778 billion tons of CO2 per year mankind would not even be capable of matching 10% of that. Mankind is not even rounding error on global CO2 emissions.
Frank says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:12 am
Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2012 at 10:26 am
Temperature linked variation in the net absorption activity of the oceans dwarfs every other aspect of the carbon cycle….
////
But if you look at the changes in CO2 during the glacial/interglacial cycles of the last 400,000 years or so, what you see is that very large changes in temperature (in the order of about 8 deg C) are needed to produce a mere 90 ppm increase or decrease….. Unless I am missing something.
_______________________________
You can look at Haynie
or Jaworowski for the alternate views.
Remember when dealing with the “official” CO2 ice core data you are looking at the poles and despite what Engelbeen says, CO2 is NOT well mixed.
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) averages CO2 data over time and space and STILL comes up with bands of CO2
On top of the poles being lower in CO2 naturally, the ice core data is inherently ‘Averaged’ and this ‘Clips’ off the high frequencies in the data just as the AIRS satellite does. The distribution of averages ALWAYS has a tighter distribution when compared to the distribution of individual data.
Add in the fact that CO2 from the bubbles only does not agree with stomata data but CO2 measurements from the whole sample (bubble plus ice) generally does. Given the fact that the bubbles only data shows lower CO2 and therefore is more “Politically Correct” I think your assumption is on fairly shaky ground. Stomata CO2 data compared to Ice Core (includes more links)
I am not going to go into it further since the argument has been done to death at WUWT. Just check out some of the back WUWT articles on CO2 for more information.
Here is a different CO2 graph
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:03 am
This is such a common arror against all logic under many sceptics…
True that humans emit only 3% of the natural emissions. But the natural carbon cycle is not only emissions, it is also sinks: and humans provide 0% of the natural sinks. Thus all what humans emit is additional and what nature emits is more than compensated by natural sinks. Against 97% natural emissions stands 98.5% natural sinks…
You need to take a course in logic. Nature does not discriminate as to source — *all* carbon dioxide molecules are grist for 100% of the sinks.
Alcheson says:
August 2, 2012 at 12:57 pm
Since 8 is at most .05Y then the equation can be written
4 = 8+160-164
Z, the sinks, went from 160 to 164gtc per year. An increase of 2%… Nothing close to doubling.
The researchers were talking about the NET sink rate, not the the total sink rate, that doubled in the past decades from 2 to 4 GtC/year, as good as the emissions doubled from 4 GtC to 8 GtC. Of course their fault that they didn’t make that clear.
Green house at 1000ppm CO2 show plants grow much faster and bigger than they do at 380PPM so the plants are clearly NOT at their saturation capacity at 380ppm.
As said before: plants don’t double their growth with 2xCO2. They increase average 50% in the best circumstances of water, sunlight, temperature, nutritients. Many of these may be the limiting factor in nature. The real increase in nature is that plants remove about 15% of the yearly human emissions (in quantity). See:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Simple experiments and well established fact that at 1000ppm more ,CO2 dissolves in water than at 380ppm. Stupid to say that if we release more CO2 in the air, the oceans wont absorb more.
and
3) Chemical kinetics. As CO2 concentration goes up, the conversion rate to carbonate also goes up.
The total amount of free CO2 in the ocean’s surface layer is only ~30 GtC, the atmosphere contains ~800 GtC. If the oceans were fresh water, a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would give a doubling to ~60 GtC in the oceans surface. That is all. But as the oceans contain buffer salts, the real content of the mixed layer is ~1000 GtC, mostly bicarbonate and some carbonate. The ocean surface layer content for a doubling in the atmosphere would increase to ~1100 GtC.
The point is that the rest of the dissociation is a equilibrium reaction which gives more H+ at the end, which pushes the equilibria back to free CO2. The net effect is that for a 100% increase in pCO2(atm) and thus pCO2(aq) – according to Henry’s Law, the conversion rate to (bi)carbonate is only 10%, the buffer factor for a weak buffering solution.
The buffer factor is also called the Revelle factor.
The deep oceans are fed by the low temperatures near the poles and are far undersaturated in CO2, thus these can buffer far more CO2 and I don’t see any reduction in CO2 uptake in the foreseeable future, here I differ with the NOAA guys… The same for permanent storage in the biosphere. But these are much slower processes…
Wow, this means the earth has a negative feedback system that tries to keep the climate stable.
Who would have thought! 😉
Translation: “Look, we found these really inconvenient facts, and too many people know about them to suppress them, but please, please, don’t cut off our grants. We’ll try and be good in future.”
Gail Combs says:
August 2, 2012 at 2:00 pm
You can look at Haynie
or Jaworowski for the alternate views.
I had a background discussion with Fred Haynie about his findings: most what he does is curve fitting and using that to explain the increase in the atmosphere. But the observations show that not the oceans ice cover is the cause of the huge seasonal fluxes in the NH, but the fast sink rate of the mid-latitude vegetation in spring (as shown by the 13C/12C ratio). Further, the oceans can’t be the source of the increase: the 13C/12C ratio is higher than in the atmosphere and we see a fast sink in ratio with the human emissions…
And about Jaworowski: his knowledge of ice cores ended in 1992 and many of his objections were already refuted in 1996 by the work of Etheridge e.a. on three Law Dome ice cores. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) averages CO2 data over time and space and STILL comes up with bands of CO2
Come on Gail, bands of CO2 which have a range of +/- 2% of full scale, while the back-and-forth exchanges with the biosphere and oceans is +/- 20% of all CO2 in the atmosphere. The average CO2 levels at Barrow and the South Pole over a year differ with no more than 5 ppmv, mainly because most of the emissions are in the NH and it takes 18 months ot level that out.
Add in the fact that CO2 from the bubbles only does not agree with stomata data but CO2 measurements from the whole sample (bubble plus ice) generally does.
Gail, where did you find that nonsense? The mostly used grating technique only measures CO2 in bubbles, while the sometimes used sublimation technique measures all CO2. Both give identical CO2 levels. Stomata data have much more troubles, like a land bias which can be corrected for by calibrating against ice cores over the past century, but there is no guaranty that the bias didn’t change over the centuries due to land use changes in the main wind direction…
The 2011 Iceland volcano, Grimsvotn, was reported to have released more CO2 in the first few days than all fossil fuels used ever. How was the alleged equlibrium affected then and with the continued volcanic eruption?
If CO2 continues to increase, it will still be a very minor trace gas. While it may have a small effect, any warming due to CO2 is still too insignificant to measure.
And if the rise continues, it will make even less difference than it may have had.
Finally, it appears that there is not enough fossil fuel carbon to double CO2 levels from here. But I will defer to Ferdinand for a definitive answer on that [so long as he once again acknowledges that the rise in CO2 has been harmless and beneficial.☺]
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
August 2, 2012 at 1:33 pm
….Gail, you forgot a few things:
– what humans are cultivating today was mostly occupied by nature before. In general, clearing forests for human/animal food/feed is a net CO2 source (especially for the root systems), at least in the first years…..
__________________________________
Actually it depends on the time frame.
You forget that coal came into use mainly because most of the trees got cut down to be used as fuel. New England has become “reforested” only within the last generation or two. The buffalo who had a great influence on the ecology of the North American great plains got almost wiped out in the mid to late 1800’s They ranged from from the Yukon to Florida. The elephant met the same fate in the 1800s due to the ivory trade and the settling of South Africa. You can not ignore those details and the forty percent of the land surface in use for crops and pasture. There is no way in heck you can say humans have had no effect on at least one ‘Natural CO2 sink’
Heck even more primitive cultures used fire to manage land.
Bill Tuttle says:
August 2, 2012 at 2:04 pm
You need to take a course in logic. Nature does not discriminate as to source — *all* carbon dioxide molecules are grist for 100% of the sinks.
Yes, but all sinks are natural, the few human sinks are negligible. Thus even if all human CO2 is captured within a minute by the next nearby tree or remains in the atmosphere forever, that doesn’t matter: the natural sinks are as large as the natural sources + halve the human emissions in quantity, whatever the exact mix which is removed.