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Until a few months ago, government targets for cutting greenhouse gases at least had the virtue of being wrong. They were the wrong targets, by the wrong dates, and they bore no relationship to the stated aim of preventing more than 2C of global warming. But they used a methodology that even their sternest critics (myself included) believed could be improved until it delivered the right results: the cuts just needed to be raised and accelerated.
Three papers released earlier this year changed all that. The first, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February, showed that the climate change we cause today will be “largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop”. About 40% of the carbon dioxide produced by humans this century will remain in the atmosphere until at least the year 3000. Moreover, thanks to the peculiar ways in which the oceans absorb heat from the atmosphere, global average temperatures are likely to “remain approximately constant
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Harbinger
on Sep 4th, 2009
@ 3:32 am:
The whole question of CO2 residence time is strongly contested. Just because one scientist says a thousand years does not make it so.
Peer Reviewed Paper: Residence Time Of CO2 Is About 5 Years
5 Aug 2009
In a paper recently published in the international peer-reviewed journal Energy & Fuels, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh (2009), Professor of Energy Conversion at The Ohio State University, addresses the residence time (RT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the air.
He finds that the RT for bulk atmospheric CO2, the molecule 12CO2, is about 5 years, in good agreement with other cited sources (Segalstad, 1998), while the RT for the trace molecule 14CO2 is about 16 years.
There is dissent so there is no consensus.
The Meinshausen paper is not transparent in that he does not disclose conflict of interest. Whilst based at Potsdam he is now part of a new