There is a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Thomas Lukas Frölicher et al, which suggests that even if we stopped emitting any carbon dioxide at all, temperatures may still rise over time. From Nature World News:
Immediate effects of the sudden carbon shutoff would be a cooling effect. But as time progresses, the model predicted gradual warming starting about 100 years after the hypothetical shutoff. Within 400 years of the shutoff, the model predicts global temperatures to rise 0.37 degrees Celsius (0.66 Fahrenheit). The rise seems small, but the researcher note that since pre-industrial times, global temperature has only risen by 0.85 C (1.5 F).
What the researchers investigations suggested was that over time, the oceans would absorb less heat, particularly oceans near the polar regions. So even though there would be a reduction in radiative forcing after carbon emissions stop, the world could still continue to heat up. The abstract of the paper explains it:
The reason is that the warming effect of decreasing ocean heat uptake together with feedback effects arising in response to the geographic structure of ocean heat uptake overcompensates the cooling effect of decreasing atmospheric CO2 on multi-century timescales.
Their study also states that estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) that are based on regression of the imbalance of Earth's energy against surface temperature are biased. I presume they mean biased low. (This supports what some scientists have been suggesting based on paleoclimatology findings, and what many of us have been concerned about.)
The bottom line is that we could be sealing a fate of two degrees with just another 750 gigatonne of carbon. 25% less than most carbon budget calculations.
Anthony Watts just copied and pasted the press release and made no comment except for his headline, which read: The ‘worse than we thought’ model. On any other website that headline would be read as reflecting the content of the paper. At WUWT it was a signal to moan that "all the models are wrong". (Archived here.)
From the WUWT comments
Talking of getting in hot water (weren't we?), the comments at WUWT can be grouped into four categories. You might quibble a bit with how I've allocated them. There is overlap and some comments would fit into more than one category. (All mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation are made by the authors of the comments.) The categories I settled on are:
- Unadulterated science denial and pseudoscience AKA The Stupid it Burns
- Fervent missionaries of the Scientific Illiterati
- Personal incredulity - all the models are wrong
- Why try if we're going to boil anyway
- Conspiracy ideation - the scientists are only in it for the money and variations
Because I got a bit carried away and collected so many comments this time around, I've put in a break to save page space and bandwidth of readers. If you are on the home page and want to numb your brain, click here to see the comments as I've sorted them into the categories listed above (archived here).
