The BBC’s Roger Harrabin has an alarming story this morning, picking up on a new 10 year long study from the University of East Anglia. The headline: the amount of carbon dioxide soaked up by the world’s oceans halved between the mid 1990s and 2000-2005.
This is really bad news. Prior to the period covered by this study, we were able to rely on natural carbon ‘sinks’ like the ocean or forest cover soaking up much of the CO2 that we emitted through burning fossil fuels – about 60 per cent of it. If, as the UEA study suggests, natural sinks are now becoming saturated, then that means we have much less of a buffer – and that in order to keep CO2 levels beneath any given ceiling, we’ll have to reduce emissions by a lot more than would have been the case if sinks were still working properly. Everything just becomes more urgent, in other words.
Unfortunately, the news is not a total surprise either. Until a few years back, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were increasing at a rate of about 1 part per million each year (CO2 concentration levels were 280ppm in pre-industrial times, and are 384ppm today). Now, that rate of increase is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5ppm a year. While global emissions have increased a lot over the last decade, not least because of rapid growth in emerging economies like China, there’s no way that emissions growth alone could have accounted for such a steep increase in the rate of concentration growth. Sink failure looked like the obvious culprit – and the UEA study provides evidence for just that conclusion.
Things just got more serious.
