(My reply)

The consensus of scientists is saying that global warming will not be going away for a very long time.


For example,

According to Professor David Archer, U of Chicago at [ www.realclimate.org/ March 2005]

"The reality is that the CO2 from a gallon out of every tank of gas will continue to affect climate for tens and even hundreds of thousands of years into the future."

"... if anything, we might expect the carbon cycle in the future to amplify our own climate forcing, rather than counteract it."

... "natural processes take up half or more of the carbon we release each year. The ocean takes up some, with no biology involved, just chemistry, and forests apparently take up the rest. The other nearly-half, however, still accumulates."

"There are several mechanisms that govern terrestrial uptake of carbon. One is CO2 fertilization, another is the longer growing
season. On the other hand, soil respiration rates increase as temperatures rise. Tropical soils don't have much carbon in them for this reason."

"Growing trees that then release their carbon 100 years from now might reduce the size of the transient atmospheric high level, without changing the long climate tail. It is interesting to note that some of the carbon sequestration proposals are not much better in this regard. Pumping CO2 into the deep ocean lowers the atmospheric transient but not the long tail. I've heard a leakage rate of 0.1% per year tossed around as acceptable for terrestrial carbon sequestration; pumping CO2 down into the ground. This would give the storage a 1000 year lifetime, again without changing the long tail."

"The existence of a significant sink today does not affect the conclusion of the long tail, nor even does the observation that the sink today is growing."

" The CaCO3 cycle was able to keep up with the 10-kyr CO2 rise as the ice sheets melted, but it won't be able to keep up with the 100-yr
anthropogenic CO2 rise."

"Volcanoes release CO2, both from metamorphic cooking of CaCO3 back into igneous rocks, and from juvenile carbon (mostly released at mid-ocean ridges)."

"We've left 280 ppm far behind. 280 ppm is the preanthropogenic concentration, from 1750 or earlier. The CO2 concentration today is 365 or something like that, going up at about 1.5 ppm per year. In my model, that is to say neglecting surprises but just considering the atmosphere / ocean / CaCO3 system, if we stopped releasing CO2 today and closed the terrestrial biosphere to either releases or uptake of carbon, just closed the system, CO2 would relax down to some value
higher than today."

"A long lifetime for CO2 adjustment is also consistent with an isotopic event in the deep sea sedimentary record from 55 million years ago, the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum event. The record
tells the story of the sudden release of an isotopically light source of carbon, triggering a fast warming in the deep sea of about 5 degrees C. Both the carbon isotope signal and the temperature (inferred from oxygen isotopes) then relaxed back toward their initial values in about 100,000 years."

www.realclimate.org/index.php

"The ocean contains fifty times as much CO2 as the atmosphere, and the pH and pCO2 of the ocean are actually buffered (stabilized) by vast reserves of carbon stored as calcium carbonate in deep sea sediments. Hence the ocean controls the atmospheric CO2 concentration, on time scales of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, and changes in ocean dynamics can drive changes in the CO2 of the atmosphere."

geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/

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Pat N.
profiles.yahoo.com/patneuman2000
groups.yahoo.com/group/ClimateArchive/