Wood Romances

The 2024 Global Carbon Budget has been out for a while now, but I thought it would be helpful to show the results of this update now along with the 2024 "year in review" type posts. The data included in the report goes from 1750 to 2023, since the report was published before the end of 2024. Below FFI stands for fossil fuels and industry and LUC stands for land use change. I'm not including uncertainties in my graphs below for the sake of keeping the graphs readable, but the uncertainties are discussed in the report linked at the bottom of this post. Carbon emissions continue to increase, though rates have flattened over the last decade or so. The bad news is that 2023 experienced record high emissions, so we haven't reversed the trend towards decreasing emissions yet. Here are graphs showing this from 1850 and 1958 (when the Keeling Curve begins. Human carbon emissions are mirrored by the land and ocean sinks plus atmospheric growth, such that on average, human emiss...

Every once in a while a paper gets published in a low-to-no impact journal suggesting that the increase in CO2 concentrations was caused by the increase in global temperatures and not by human emissions. There are several blogs and unpublished manuscripts that make similar claims. Now for sure, since CO2 is less soluble in warmer water, increasing sea surface temperatures, so increasing temperature does cause an ocean-to-atmosphere CO2 flux. But can this explain why CO2 levels are increasing? Some say yes. The most recent paper [1] was published in a no-name MDPI journal called Sci, and Judith Curry promoted it on her blog .  Papers and arguments like this are obviously nonsense, but this paper is a little unique in that it includes the very evidence that proves its central thesis wrong. The following chart comes from the paper. It takes data from the IPCC AR6 accounting of the carbon budget, showing the ocean, land and human sources and sinks. From the numbers the authors included...

In a previous post , I evaluated a recently published MDPI paper claiming that we could with minimal effort limit CO2 concentrations to 475 ppm and warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. The paper was horribly flawed, but it was based on the assumption that natural sinks will increase more rapidly than our continued emissions. I thought it would be an interesting exercise how scientists expect natural sinks to respond as CO2 concentrations (and global temperatures) increase. I want to show expected changes in sinks as CO2 concentrations rise. As noted in that previous post, the 2021 carbon budget values are estimated per year, and converting these values so that they reflect the size of sinks in terms of atmospheric CO2 concentrations potentially introduces biases into the data. I do not want to go into a lot of detail. Instead I want to cover the land and ocean sink in general terms. I'm also only considering the impact of CO2 without evaluating the effect of increases in ot...