Climate Letter #2135

My last letter dealt with issues surrounding the ability of oceans to capture and sequester a significant portion of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity.  The questions involved are of great importance to anyone interested in evaluating the future outlook for climate change.  One of the questions considers how real is the possibility of holding the trending global temperature increase to 1.5C above the pre-industrial average, as continually sought by the UN and IPCC, but otherwise looked upon in the science community as practically hopeless.  A major public relations effort in support of the UN’s position is currently being instigated based on newly released scientific findings, employing leading scientist Michael Mann and Scientific American magazine as fundamental explainers.  Apart from a limited Energy+Mix website story the particular source of these findings was not immediately available to me on Friday but I was able to dig it all out over the weekend.

An intriguing scientific study was published in September, 2020, in Nature Comunications based on newly-discovered evidence that the current uptake of CO2 by ocean surfaces was greatly underestimated, by as much as 45% per year.  Here is how it was described in a press release at that time: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-ocean-carbon-uptake-widely-underestimated.html.  The full report is available at this link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18203-3#Abs1.  Shortly thereafter Carbon Brief provided an excellent explanation in a guest post written by two of the authors of the study: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the-oceans-are-absorbing-more-carbon-than-previously-thought.  The study makes a case that I think is quite credible and perhaps slightly sensational because of the size of the revision.  As for the implications, the authors themselves came to a conclusion that was certainly interesting but also quite modest and entirely reasonable.  As they say in the guest post, “A larger ocean sink could imply that CO2 emissions are larger than currently thought or that the land sink is smaller than we currently think. The sink seems to be increasing with time, especially in the last 20 years, and we believe this is because atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise rapidly, dissolving more every year into the surface waters.”  That’s it. 

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The new and recently devised interpretation, as far as I can tell, has not yet been set forth in a regular scientific study that is readily available.  The main idea, however, has been described to some extent in the October issue of Scientific American, which you can read in full in the following post taken from the Energy+Mix website: https://www.theenergymix.com/2021/10/28/climate-relief-fast-action-now-stops-further-warming-in-years-not-decades/.  Further interpretation can be gleaned from Michael Mann’s comments that were delivered by the same website last Friday, as represented in my letter.  If the ocean sink is in fact larger than we thought, and the terrestrial sink is smaller than we thought, in offsetting amounts, leaving the total sink with the same measure as before, does this new knowledge have any bearing on future expectations that creates a new reason for optimism? Mann seems to think so, but I have not seen any details of what that reason may be, in order to justify a major CCNow promotion. Or will there indeed be a promotion? It should come quite soon.

Carl 

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