Science Area:

Atmospheric
Earth
Freshwater
Marine
Terrestrial

ENRIs:

Biodiversity
Environmental Risks and Hazards
Global Change
Natural Resource Management
Pollution and Waste

Science Topics:

Atmospheric carbon cycle
Atmospheric carbon dioxide
Climate modelling
Ocean acidification
Ocean atmosphere interaction
Ocean modelling
Climate & Climate Change
Climate modelling
Ocean - Atmosphere Interact.

Science Classification details

Overall Classification:

Unknown

Abstract: When we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere through industrial activity, only around half of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere, with the remainder being taken up approximately equally through photosynthesis by plants on land and being absorbed by the oceans. These anthropogenic CO2 'sinks' are essentially saving us from a large part of the global warming that we would otherwise be experiencing. New evidence suggests that our estimates of how this fraction of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere is changing, and will continue to change, may be too high, meaning that there may be more hope that we can prevent atmospheric CO2 concentrations rising too high than was previously thought. Whilst we can estimate how much CO2 we are presently emitting, and can measure the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and therefore work out how strong these sinks are (i.e. how much CO2 they are taking out of the atmosphere), we must calculate how this number will change in the future if we are to determine how much CO2 we can emit as a society without exceeding dangerous CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. This project aims to give us a better understanding of what this future change in the fraction of CO2 staying in the atmosphere is, by correcting a bias we have identified in the models we use to make these projections. We make projections of how the land and ocean CO2 sinks may change in the future using increasingly comprehensive Earth System Models (which are climate modes which also contain a representation of additional processes such as the carbon cycle). While these models are the best possible tools we have to simulate future climate change, they are still far from perfect. We have shown that in the North Atlantic, which is the most intense ocean CO2 sink, these models underestimate how quickly the CO2 absorption is increasing, and have identified what the models are doing wrong. This project will extend this work from the North Atlantic to the full ocean, and by correcting for the biases that cause the models to under-predict this change, produce new and improved future estimates of ocean CO2 absorption. One we have our improved estimates of future changes in the strength of the ocean carbon sink, we will account for how the land CO2 sink responds to this, and produce a set of new scenarios describing how much CO2 can be emitted through human activity through time if we are not to exceed the atmospheric CO2 concentrations linked to global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures. The overarching aim of this project is to provide UK and international governments with the best possible impartial information from which they can plan how best to work towards the global warming targets (the 'Paris Agreement') set at the Paris Climate Conference in December 2015.