Researchers have forecasted a fall in the ability of Southern oceans to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere due to increased global warming rate by up to 30% making it more difficult to stabilize man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the air and increased risk of accelerated global warming effects as published in the International weekly journal, Science.
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Researchers have forecasted a fall in the ability of Southern oceans to absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere due to increased global warming rate by up to 30% making it more difficult to stabilize man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the air and increased risk of accelerated global warming effects as published in the International weekly journal, Science.
The scientists from countries including Britain, France and Germany termed the southern oceans as one of the world’s natural “carbon sinks” accounting for 15 per cent of all the carbon taken out of the atmosphere and believed that this rate has declined constantly each decade since 1981 on the basis of a four year study of data from 51 carbon dioxide monitoring stations around the world. This is feared to have been caused by none other than man’s own actions and has happened at least two decades earlier than expected.
Temperatures due to global warming are predicted to rise by almost 1.5C (2.7F) midway of the century, not taking into account any increase in further emissions. Till now, since the industrial revolution, 500 giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide has been stated to be released into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels, cement manufacture and changes in land use, a quarter being absorbed by the oceans and the other quarter by vegetation.
“This is serious,” said Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), two of the world’s leading environmental research centers and the paper’s lead author. “This is the first time that we’ve been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink. With the Southern Ocean reaching its saturation point more CO2 will stay in our atmosphere. Since the early 1980s the carbon sink hasn’t changed. In the same period the emissions have gone up by 43 per cent.”
The fall in the ability to soak up carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere is ascribed to high winds acting on ocean currents, bringing deeper waters that already contain high levels of carbon to the surface leaving the surface more saturated and unable to absorb high portions of CO2. The high winds are believed to have been caused by climatic changes due to combined alterations in the ozone layer and carbon emissions.
The theory behind the strengthening of winds describes how emissions of chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), along with other chlorine- and bromine-containing compounds have depleted the stratospheric ozone levels, resulting in a massive thinning or "ozone hole" over the Antarctic, in turn producing a cooling 20 to 40 kilometers above the icy surface of the continent, thus increasing the intensity of westerly winds.
Ian Totterdell, a climate modeler at the Met Office Hadley Centre said “This is the first time we have been able to get convincing evidence that a change in the uptake of CO2 by the oceans is linked to climate change. It’s one of many feedbacks we didn’t expect to kick in until some way into the 21st century.”
The team used CO2 measurements in water collected during research cruises in the Southern Ocean in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2002 to check their calculations. The statistics of the research state that the net quantity of carbon dioxide absorbed by the Southern Ocean from the atmosphere in 1981 was 0.6 billion tonnes but it emitted 0.3 billion tonnes back into it. In 2004 it absorbed 0.8 billion tonnes but emitted 0.5 billion tones.
The southern ocean winds are projected to get more intense in case CO2 emissions continue to be released at the same rate. Current carbon dioxide levels are 383 parts per million (ppm) and climbing at roughly two ppm per year. The IPCC, the European Union and other organizations have also declared 450 ppm as the CO2 level that needs to be stabilized to minimize extreme impacts and risks of global warming.
A secondary finding also revealed that the combination of CO2 and seawater, leading to water becoming acidic, is faster in the Southern oceans, the fourth largest of the world's five oceans, as compared to other oceans where it is believed to affect marine life not before 2050.
Professor Chris Rapley, director of BAS confessed that uncertainties in the research remain but the findings are a cause of worry.
Global warming has not been globally uniform. Some areas (including parts of the southeastern U.S.) have, in fact, cooled over the last century. The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 70°N.
I am like approximately 98% of the rest of the population, I watch the news and read news accounts from around the globe (via the Internet) and realize that “sometime” in the future we’re either going to melt or freeze to death mainly because we like to drive and enjoy a little light during the evening.
It is reported that we’re injecting far too much carbon dioxide into the air through our inefficient internal combustion engines and our coal fired power generation systems.
I decided, as a man living and breathing the air, to see exactly what it is we’re messing with, and in order to satisfy my uneducated self I would take a poke around and see what these experts are screaming about.
When they tell us we’re injecting so many “parts per million” (“ppm”) I first wanted to know, into how many ppm’s are we talking about that are existing today. So I stepped back into my basic science classes and rummaged around in my education.
The atmosphere of our planet is made up a varied assortment of gases, the primary gas is nitrogen which makes up about 80% (some say 78%) of the air we breath, so starting from there I worked forward. My first step was to find out approximately how much our atmosphere “weight” – this is important in that then I could attach or calculate some figures to attach to those ppm numbers being thrown at us everyday.
The weight of the our atmosphere is found by using the atmospheric pressure at sea level, which on average equals 14.7 pound per square inch or about 10.2 tons per square meter – I next needed to determine how many square meters of surface is on this Blue Ball, water and land.
This is found by 4 x “pie” x “r” squared, 4 x 3.141592654 x 6,367.443 (average radius of Earth) squared, which equals 509.495 million square kilometers or 509,495 billion square meters. Taking this number and multiplying it times the weight (10.2) per square meter we see that our total atmosphere weights approximately 5.1968 million billion tons.
Make up of this weight:
Nitrogen: @80% equals 3.1181 million billion tons
Oxygen @21% equals 1.0912 million billion tons
Water Vapor: @03% equals 0.1559 million billion tons
Argon: @0.9% equals 0.04677 million billion tons
Carbon Dioxide: @0.3% equals 0.01559 million billion tons
Keep in mind that these number are not absolutes, I have found various other composition formula’s running between 75% and 81% for Nitrogen, Argon at 1% and CO2 as low as .01 to .1%, so you can see the final calculation, depending on how you wanted “our” effect on the atmosphere to really come out.
Reading the “real” numbers, instead of this million billion stuff, I find that our atmospheric carbon dioxide weight is;
1,559,054,704,826,000 pounds
15,981,224,816,025 pounds is the latest number available that demonstrates how much CO2 we contributed to the atmosphere in one-year, or about 1%, other estimates put this value at 24 billion tons per year or 48,600 billion pounds, using the ton conversion of 2,025 lbs per ton. Now that is getting up there around 3.12% injection weight, – what number do you believe?
Assuming we’re injecting the lower number that translates into us burning about 4,361,460,523,247 of carbon material every year, using the higher number it means we’re burning about 13,263,500,380,600 pounds every year.
Some figures show that driving a mid-size car for 12,000 miles will create approximately 7,189 pounds of CO2 per year at 30 mpg (or about 1,962 lbs of carbon burning) if you’re a two car family you’re contributing about 0.00000041264% to the CO2 cycle in the USA – better knock it off!
Assuming there are 245 million cars running around in the USA the approximate value of CO2 they generate is 1,761,243,750,000 pounds – or about 50.5% of the USA’s contribution in total – naturally this is assuming they’re all mid-size cars getting 30 mpg and only driving 12,000 miles per year.
When I searched for how much coal a 1,000 megawatt coal fired electric generating facility burned a year I found the average to be around 3.2 million tons per year, and accordingly since the atomic table, which says CO2 is 3.664 times that value this means this plant is putting 23,743,958,304 pounds into the atmosphere each year (this is older plants that do not have all the “new” technology enabling it to “scrub” its emissions). That compared to your car at 1,962 pounds, is a bunch.
It is noted that around the world we burn 3,200 million tons of coal each year to produce about 38% of the electrical needs – that is a whole lot of coal, and when you compare this to the total ejection of CO2 into the atmosphere (at the higher number 48,600 billion tons) that is about 49% of the total.
One thing I have learned, there are sooooooo manyyyyyy numbers floating around on the Internet on how much we are contributing and not contributing that at some point it makes it very difficult to believe any of it. You know what I mean? At best it is very confusing.