• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska March 14, 2023
U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse March 14, 2023
$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’ March 14, 2023
UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’ March 9, 2023
Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions March 9, 2023
Next
Prev

Warming 'will be hard to reverse'

November 25, 2013
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A simulation suggests that slowing global warming may be more urgent than anyone has recognised: even halting greenhouse gas emissions could still leave the Earth’s average temperature rising.

LONDON, 25 November – A Swiss-American team of scientists has looked far into the future and calculated that the present lukewarm plans to limit climate change may involve too little action, applied too late.

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
Subscribe

Thomas Frölicher of ETH-Zurich and colleagues from Princeton report in Nature Climate Change that they tried to model the long-term planetary adjustment after carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning stopped altogether.

They simulated a planet in which greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, until concentrations in the atmosphere had reached four times the pre-Industrial levels, and a total of 1,800 billion tons had been released into the atmosphere. And then the emissions stopped.

The consequences were unexpected. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would indeed gradually be absorbed by forests, crops, algae and other natural CO2 devourers; it would be incorporated into the calcium shells and corals and skeletons in the ocean and then slowly be tucked away as rock.

But after an initial period in which temperatures started to drop, something else happened. The simulated planet started to warm again, and go on warming for another 400 years or more.

Oceans’ influence dims

That is because although what scientists call “radiative forcing” – CO2 traps infra-red radiation and keeps the Earth’s temperature up – would begin to ease, the polar oceans that play such a powerful role in the climate machine would become less efficient at removing the surplus heat.

The logic of all this rests on the reasoning that life on Earth for the last 10,000 years has continued comfortably with a particular ratio of CO2 to other gases in the atmosphere. To increase carbon levels significantly – and this has already begun to happen – would therefore disturb this comfortable equilibrium, and then trigger a very long period of uncertainty.

Frölicher and colleagues found that 40% of the extra carbon in the atmosphere would have been been soaked up within 20 years, and 80% within 1,000 years. This would of course affect temperatures.

First, as the carbon dioxide levels reached a maximum, the world would warm sharply and then, after 15 or 20 years, start to cool. The cooling could continue for a century.

Little time

But in the simulation, after the initial 100-year cooling-off period the Earth started to warm again. It went on warming for 400 years, by 0.37°C. This doesn’t sound much – but the Earth has already warmed by 0.85°C over pre-Industrial averages.

The world’s governments have collectively agreed that it would be good if the rise in average global temperatures could be halted at 2°C, and they have accepted in principle – serious concerted action has yet to be agreed – that with 500 billion tons of CO2 already released into the atmosphere, the safe limit should be 1,000 billion. But this now looks less plausible.

“If our results are correct, the total carbon emissions required to stay below 2°C of warming would have to be three quarters of previous estimates, only 750 billion tons of carbon,” said Frölicher. “Thus, limiting the warming to 2°C would require keeping future cumulative carbon emissions below 250 billion tons, only half of the already emitted amount of 500 billion tons.”

The research is a simulation, and the real lesson is probably that researchers still have a lot of work to do to understand the subtle relationships between atmosphere and ocean. But it suggests that the climate problem is more urgent than anyone may have realised.

“This is illustrative of how difficult it may be to reverse climate change – we stop the emissions but we still get an increase in the global mean temperature,” says Frölicher. – Climate News Network



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
46
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
26
Western Arctic National Parklands/wikimedia commons
Arctic & Antarctica

Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop

January 2, 2023
30

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Behrat/Wikimedia Commons

Hawaii Firm Turns Home Water Heaters into Grid Batteries

March 14, 2023
207
U.S. National Transportation Safety Board/flickr

$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’

March 14, 2023
80
David Dodge, Green Energy Futures/flickr

U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

March 14, 2023
66
Rebecca Bollwitt/flickr

Fossils Stay ‘Oily’, Gibsons Sues Big Oil, U.S. Clean Energy Booms, EU Pushes Fossil Phaseout, and Fukushima Disaster was ‘No Accident’

March 14, 2023
60
EcoAnalytics

Canadians Want Strong Emissions Cap Regulations, Not More Missed Targets

March 14, 2023
54
U.S. Bureau of Land Management/flickr

Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska

March 14, 2023
40

Recent Posts

Raysonho/wikimedia commons

Purolator Pledges $1B to Electrify Last-Mile Delivery

March 14, 2023
35
United Nations

UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’

March 10, 2023
86
Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions

March 10, 2023
162
jasonwoodhead23/flickr

First Nation Scorches Imperial Oil, Alberta Regulator Over Toxic Leak

March 8, 2023
360
MarcusObal/wikimedia commons

No Climate Risk Targets for Banks, New Guides for Green Finance as 2 Federal Agencies Issue New Rules

March 8, 2023
230
FMSC/Flickr

Millions Face Food Insecurity as Horn of Africa Braces for Worst Drought Ever

March 8, 2023
240
Next Post

US taxpayers foot bill for climate inaction

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}