{"id":56578,"date":"2021-01-31T08:56:44","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T13:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56578"},"modified":"2021-01-31T08:56:44","modified_gmt":"2021-01-31T13:56:44","slug":"new-research-on-forests-and-oceans-suggest-projections-of-future-warming-may-be-too-conservative-with-serious-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56578","title":{"rendered":"New research on forests and oceans suggest projections of future warming may be too conservative, with serious consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

New research on forests and oceans suggest projections of future warming may be too conservative, with serious consequences<\/a><\/h3>\n
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How much will the world warm with ongoing fossil-fuel carbon emissions? It\u2019s a big question that preoccupies policymakers and activists, with important discussions about when the world will hit two degrees, are we really on a path to four degrees of warming with current Paris commitments, and so on.<\/p>\n

And the answer is that the world is likely to warm more than current projections, if two recently published pieces of research on the terrestrial and ocean carbon sinks are any guide.<\/p>\n

Warming projections and carbon sinks.<\/b>\u00a0Future warming projections come from complex climate models, which combine historic data, current observations, equations that encompass current understandings of the bio-geo-physical processes, and some assumptions about processes where direct observation or modelling is more difficult.<\/p>\n

About 30% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that humans are pouring into the atmosphere mixes with the top layer of the ocean (making the water more acidic and posing a growing acidification threat to ocean life), about 30% is absorbed by the terrestrial biosphere (trees and plants), and about 40% stays in the air, heating the planet.<\/p>\n

Assumptions about those processes in the future fundamentally affect projections of future warming. If these ocean and terrestrial carbon stores (or \u201ccarbon sinks\u201d) become less efficient, then a greater proportion of human emissions will stay in the air, and warming will be faster than currently projected for a given level of emissions.<\/p>\n

So the models make assumptions about these carbon stores:<\/p>\n

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  1. For the\u00a0terrestrial carbon sink<\/b>, it has been observed that with more CO2, plants grow faster because there is more CO2\u00a0\u201cfood\u201d for them to absorb.\u00a0 This is known as the \u201cfertilisation effect\u201d, and while there are\u00a0highly divergent sink trajectories<\/a>\u00a0from Earth system models, the models \u201cnevertheless\u00a0agree on continued futures increases in sink strength<\/a>\u00a0due to the CO2\u00a0fertilisation effect.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

    <\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    New research on forests and oceans suggest projections of future warming may be too conservative, with serious consequences How much will the world warm with ongoing fossil-fuel carbon emissions? It\u2019s a big question that preoccupies policymakers and activists, with important discussions about when the world will hit two degrees, are we really on a path […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[113,4296,141,7439,9104,1004,17945,4553,328,369,1790],"class_list":["post-56578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-carbon-sink","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-code-red","tag-climate-modelling","tag-co2","tag-david-spratt","tag-forests","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-global-warming","tag-oceans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56579,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56578\/revisions\/56579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}