The 1,000 Year Ouch

How much do you know about atmospheric CO2 residence time?

The deep ocean is already the world’s largest carbon
sink. Sinking all excess atmospheric CO2 to the depths
would add less than 2% to the deep ocean’s total. 

If you’re like most people —from 70% to 93% of people, according to recent research by the University of Washington’s Ann Bostrom—you think you know more than you do.

Perhaps you cottoned to the right answer to “the CO2 storage problem” — it’s implied in the article title: Many centuries. Most of us (myself included, until I began working last year with Dr. William Calvin to establish the CO2 Foundation) reasonably — but wrongly — imagine excess air-based CO2 to act like air pollution — gone quickly once emissions stop. We couldn’t be more wrong. If we hand over to nature the responsibility to clean up the current excess CO2 in the air, it will take at least a thousand years. Ignore for a moment that humans, and ever-more-intense wildfires, continue pumping out CO2 at prodigious rates… The clean-up can’t even start yet.

Read the story from Medium by Raz Mason - “The 1,000 Year Ouch.”