Earth's CO2 absorption not as bad as expected, controversial climate change study finds

The balance between the airborne and the fraction of absorbed carbon dioxide has stayed nearly the same since 1850. Even with CO2 emissions having risen from some 2 billion tons a year to today's 35 billion tons a year, new data shows.

This data implies that the ecosystems on Earth are much more capable to absorb CO2 than was previously believed.

These results are in opposite opinion from a large amount of research that anticipated the CO2 absorbing capacity of the ecosystems and oceans to start diminishing as the carbon dioxide emissions rose.

This would lead the greenhouse gas levels to shoot up considerably. But the fact is that the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 plus/minus 1.4 percent per ten years, found Dr. Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol. This number is pretty much equal to zero.

This work is quite important due to the climate change policy being negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. These negotiations have been based on projections that factored for the free sinking of CO2 and many researchers are pointing at evidence that the sink is already decreasing.

A change in policy could prove very costly to all countries involved. Doing so by relying on faulty data could have a very negative effect on the economy and general way of life.

The study also resulted in another erroneous estimation of deforestation emissions. Apparently, the rates may have been overestimated by up to 75 percent. These results agree with the ones published in Nature Geoscience in early November by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam.

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