The second study meanwhile looked at how aerosol emissions impact the Earth's temperature through a phenomenon the researchers call «transient climate sensitivity,» or how much of the Earth's temperature will change when the amount
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches twice its level during the pre-industrial times.
Published in the journal Tellus under the title, «Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa observatory,» the paper documented for the first time the stark rise
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.
However, substantial research indicates that contemporary carbon emissions, even if stopped abruptly, will sustain or nearly sustain near - term temperature increases for millennia because of the long residence
time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and inertia in the climate system, e.g., the slow exchange of heat between ocean and atmosphere (2 ⇓ ⇓ — 5).
Are you saying that the industrial revolution was just happened to coincide in time and magnitude to the build -
up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there is some other, unidentified geochemical phenomenon that is responsible?
Stefan and I pointed out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) says we could stay within 450
ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a cost of a mere 0.06 percent in lost growth a year.
Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal says the agricultural soils of the world have the potential to soak up 13 percent
of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today — the equivalent of scrubbing every ounce of CO2 released into the atmosphere since 1980.
Photosynthetic processes are accelerated with the increased
availability of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, hence, it is conjectured that ring growth would also be correlated with atmospheric carbon dioxide; see Graybill and Idso (1993).
For instance, models with different parameterization strategies give very different estimates of the amount
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere necessary to raise Earth's surface temperature by 2 °C — with critical implications for policy decisions.
The long
lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the long lifetime of sources like coal - burning power plants once built, mean that the «faucet» for CO2 is getting cranked open just when it should be going in the opposite direction.