Climate Letter #1383

From Carbon Brief, a climate-related profile of India, the world’s third largest emitter of CO2.  This masterful presentation covers every aspect of a complex situation bearing many issues that are completely unresolved.  India has the world’s fastest growing major economy, mainly dependent on coal for energy, will soon have the largest population, and has a long way to go before reaching full modernization.  Reversing its growth in coal consumption will be a major challenge, important to all of us.

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A new study adds to our understanding of the important oceanic sink for CO2.  The latest research shows a consistent pattern of absorption of any addition of CO2 to the atmospheric content, equal to about 31% of the addition created in any one year.  “This is because as long as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rises, the oceanic sink strengthens more or less proportionally: the more CO2 is in the atmosphere, the more is absorbed by the oceans — until it becomes eventually saturated.  So far, that point has not been reached.”  They also observed clear regional deviations from this pattern, suggesting that there is no guarantee that uptake will remain as robust with time.
–Added comment:  Nothing was said about the possibility that the oceans might “give back” similar quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere in the event of massive drawdowns that hopefully will be achieved in the future by negative emissions technologies.  This uncertain prospect is still being debated.
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Humans can still prevent future additions of methane to the atmosphere, even after potentially large emissions expected from the thawing of permafrost.  We know how much methane is released by human activity, and we know it can be greatly reduced by determined efforts.  We also know that methane, unlike CO2, quickly drops out of the atmosphere unless it is constantly replenished.  The natural additions of methane that are due to unfold as permafrost thaws should not be great enough to replenish the very large amounts that humans are capable of eliminating—with effort.  (This does not appear to cover the likewise expected CO2 emissions from thawing permafrost, a totally different category.)
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Comments on the nature and activities of the polar vortex (The Conversation).  This article, like most others, speaks about the vortex in singular terms, but then clearly points out the existence of two different vortexes that are quite separate from each other but do have a way of interacting.  The lower and broader tropospheric vortex is what we usually call the jet stream and its behavior is quite irregular, while the one high in the stratosphere is much tighter but still subject to damage, as we saw this winter.
–The jet stream in fact is not a single thing that flows in a continuous circle. but is broken into a number of segments of greatly varying strength that are often poorly connected, or not at all, and tend to have sequences in separate latitudes that bounce around quite a bit, as you can see in the following link.  (Scroll down for the full picture.)  These segments all have some degree of influence over the high-level flow of moist air that arises from evaporation in the tropical oceans—a subject of considerable interest that I want to talk more about in future letters.
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The battery revolution is far from over.  Here is a story provided by the University of Southern California that tells about the research being done by varying departments of just that one university, and it is all pretty amazing.  Similar efforts are being made at schools and other organizations all across the globe.  One can feel pretty confident that before long these efforts will bear fruit, always to the benefit of renewable energy, and bad for fossil fuels.
Carl

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