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.”

Trees are worth billions to Australia's economy — but how we value them is changing

How much is a tree worth?

The tree economy has many branches — and they're not all obvious.

In economic terms, your answer depends on how you value them.

Forestry exports contribute $3 billion to Australia's economy; its manufacturing, sales and service income make up around $24 billion per year.

Increasingly, agroforestry and carbon abatement initiatives also provide an economic benefit.

So while money might not grow on trees, they are becoming more profitable.

Read the ABC News story by Farz Edraki - “Trees are worth billions to Australia's economy — but how we value them is changing.”

Divided by drought

What do you do when your city is running out of water? The answer, at least in one of the world’s most unequal countries, depends on how much money you have.

Within the next few months, Cape Town’s taps could run dry, the result of a protracted drought and a government failure to provide an alternative water source to this city of 4 million. Now, residents are scrambling to find their own private solutions.

For the wealthy, that means hiring companies to dig boreholes and wells. It means buying truckloads of bottled water, even at inflated prices. It means ordering desalination machines to make groundwater drinkable — or safe enough to fill a swimming pool.

For the poor, it means waiting to see what the government comes up with, and contemplating whether you can afford to cut back on food to be able to buy water.

Read The Washington Post story by Kevin Sieff - “Divided by drought.

Study narrows range of Earth's warming response as greenhouse gases rise

New research has sharply narrowed the likely estimate of how much the Earth will warm with a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, potentially honing estimates that have stood for a quarter century.

Estimating how much the planet will warm as we lift
greenhouse gas levels has been an active area of research.

The long-standing estimate for the so-called equilibrium climate sensitivity used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been that surface temperatures would rise between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees for each doubling of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases.

Read Peter Hannam’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Study narrows range of Earth's warming response as greenhouse gases rise.”