Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks

[RedEarth]

The good news: The earth’s carbon cycle has natural negative feedbacks that reverse natural surges in carbon dioxide.

The bad news: We are spewing CO2 into the atmosphere 14,000 times faster than nature has over the past 600,000 years, far too quickly for those feedbacks to respond.

This comes from “Close mass balance of long-term carbon fluxes from ice-core CO2 and ocean chemistry records,” in Nature Geosciences (subs. reqd, news article here) by Zeebe and Caldeira. Put another way:

“These feedbacks operate so slowly that they will not help us in terms of climate change … that we’re going to see in the next several hundred years,” Zeebe said by telephone from the University of Hawaii. “Right now we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium.“

http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/28/human-driven-co2-rise-14000-times-faster-than-nature-overwhelming-the-slow-negative-feedbacks/

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Nah, the problem is the trees. Smirk." - Republicon homelanders

eom