This was diaried this morning but some parts of the diary were in error, and, this new study needs to be widely recognized as an exceedingly bad sign. This is probably the worse news for the world since Dick Cheney's warmongering speech this weekend. [chuckles weakly]
The global carbon dioxide balance is actually MUCH WORSE than was thought when the latest predictions were made on the progress of global warming/climate change.
MUCH WORSE.
I will elaborate below; but when I read of this new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, I immediately thought of Thomas Friedman's latest piece in the New York Times: This is no longer about changing what kind of lightbulbs you use. This is now about who will lead.
The study worsens even the gloomy predictions of this year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, which shared the Nobel peace prize this month with Al Gore, said there were only eight years left to prevent the worst effects of global warming, by acting to curb emissions.
Dr Le Quere said: "We are emitting far more than anticipated when the IPCC scenarios were drawn up in the late 1990s." Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning has risen by an average 2.9% each year since 2000. During the 1990s the annual rise was 0.7%. [4-fold]
link
...scientists were puzzled why dozens of measuring stations across the world were showing a CO2 spike for 2006, the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase in the greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million (ppm); from 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year; since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 1.9ppm.
The new study, published in the [exceedingly prestigious] US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says three processes have contributed to this increase: growth in the world economy, heavy use of coal in China, and a weakening of natural "sinks" - forests, seas and soils that absorb carbon.
In other words, humans are producing much more carbon dioxide than was factored into the predictions, the earth is much less able to absorb it, and the result is that Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising much faster than the models predicted.
The predictive math has to be redone using the new information; I can't do that (though some efforts are made below in the comments). But what we can say at this point that the proximate cause (ppms of carbon dioxide) of global warming is increasing 25% faster than we thought. Further, there is some sort of saturation thing happening, which could imply that smaller and smaller fractions of produced CO2 will be absorbed by the earth, and thus carbon dioxide concentration may increase even faster in the future.
What does this mean? well, in the first place, it means that the tipping point is nearer than we thought. Is it 25% closer? is it 6 years instead of 8?
Secondly, it means that the momentum is going the wrong way; the economic momentum, the political momentum, the chemical momentum...the law of mass action is NOT on our side. It will take more, much more, to break this thing, than we thought.
This is very bad news. I know there is a lot of it going around these last few days. But we can't tarry much longer on CO2 production and warming. I don't think we can turn it around unless we choose the right leaders, leaders who can and will lead on this issue, who will tell corporations what to do. Nothing good is going to happen for at least another two years. What does that leave? four years? to change the world?
Friedman:
Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light bulbs.
Why? Because leaders write the rules, set the standards and offer the tax incentives that drive market behavior across a whole city, state or country. Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace. And the energy-climate challenge we face today is a huge scale problem. Without scale, all you have is a green hobby.