Thursday, December 31, 2009

CO2 Fail

clipped from www.agu.org

Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part
of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which
has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction
since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows
that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use
change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle
models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.