Trends in Sink Performance
According to a report in Nature magazine, (November, 2009) the first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era, and the first time scientists have actually measured it, suggests "the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions—a finding with potentially wide implications for future climate." With total world emissions from fossil fuels growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%, indicating that over time the ocean will become "a less efficient sink of manmade carbon." Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia University concludes that the studies suggest "we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past, and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels." However, a recent paper by Wolfgang Knorr indicates that the fraction of CO2 absorbed by carbon sinks has not changed since 1850.
Read more about this topic: Carbon Sink
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