Earth Equity News

Atmospheric C02 Levels Could Remain Elevated for Thousands of Years. By Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers, February 24, 2009. "Until now, most discussion of climate change has been about what scientific evidence shows is likely to happen between now and 2100. However, scientific research shows that the carbon dioxide gas released from burning fossil fuels lasts in the atmosphere much longer than mere decades. David Archer, a leading climate researcher who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a new book that looks at carbon dioxide's 'long tail' and what it means for changes on Earth in the future. If the world continues its heavy use of coal over the next couple of hundred years until it's essentially used up, it would take several centuries more for the oceans to absorb about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. In those centuries, there would be a 'climate storm' that Archer says would be significantly worse than the forecast from now to 2100. The remaining carbon dioxide -- the long tail -- would stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, leaving a warmer climate. About 10 percent of it would still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years, Archer writes in The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate... Archer concludes that there's still time to cut fossil fuel emissions enough to avoid disaster. 'The question may come down to ethics, rather than economics,' Archer writes, much as the issue of slavery did more than a century ago. 'Ultimately it didn't matter whether it was economically beneficial or costly to give up. It was simply wrong.'"