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Near Zero Emissions Needed

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years ago

Science News –March 5, 2008

Proposed CO2 cuts not deep enough

New research shows that CO2 emissions must be near zero to stabilize the climate.

 

Many scientists and politicians are proposing to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% over the next 40 years or so, but a new study suggests that even those steep cuts will not prevent significant future warming. The only way to keep temperatures stable is to bring emissions down to near zero, according to research scheduled to be published March 7 in Geophysical Research Letters (DOI 10.1029/2007GL032388).

 

Today's CO2 emissions will continue to warm the earth for more than 500 years, a study warns.Previous work has focused on how to stabilize CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but the new study is the first to directly examine the emissions cuts needed to stabilize temperature. Climate scientists Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and Damon Matthews of Concordia University (Canada) used a model to simulate how earth's climate would respond to various levels of CO2 emissions over the next 500 years, taking into account the flow of heat between the atmosphere and oceans.

 

The researchers found that the warming effect of CO2 can persist long after the greenhouse gas is removed from the atmosphere. After CO2 traps warmth, it passes some of that heat to the ocean, where it is stored and released slowly over time. When the researchers shut off all human-caused CO2 emissions in the model, global temperatures remained high for at least 500 years even as greenhouse gas levels slowly dropped in the atmosphere. Because of this delayed warming, "the climate warming resulting from CO2 emissions is not a transient phenomenon but rather persists well beyond the timescale of human experience," they write.

 

Although eliminating CO2 emissions is a daunting task, "there's no fundamental technological barrier to doing it," Caldeira says, citing renewable energy and other energy-saving measures. At the least, he says, "if we need to cut emissions to near zero, then we need to recognize that fact" to work toward a carbon-free economy. —ERIKA ENGELHAUPT

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