Sunday, July 21, 2013

The Keeling Curve | How Much CO2 Can The Oceans Take Up?

The Keeling Curve | How Much CO2 Can The Oceans Take Up?: "Recent estimates have calculated that 26 percent of all the carbon released as CO2 from fossil fuel burning, cement manufacture, and land-use changes over the decade 2002–2011 was absorbed by the oceans. (About 28 percent went to plants and roughly 46 percent to the atmosphere.) During this time, the average annual total release of was 9.3 billion tons of carbon per year, thus on average 2.5 billion tons went into the ocean annually."

So... of the 9.3 billion in CO2 emissions, the oceans have been absorbing about 26%. But, as in all things that reach saturation, this cannot be expected to continue.

We do know that CO2 will go into the air, since the atmosphere gets first go at fossil fuel emissions. So the Greenhouse gasses might start to rise much, much faster.

This certainly looks like a no-win.

'via Blog this'

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