Thursday, April 08, 2021

Study reveals uncertainty in how much carbon the ocean absorbs over time

Very recommendable! Climate science is not exact! It is too complex! Uncertainty rules!

What are the implications? Global Warming is a hoax! Climate Change is a religion!

"Climate projections could be off by five years, researchers find." Just by five years, hm! Probably, a lot more years!

"The ocean’s “biological pump” describes the many marine processes that work to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transport it deep into the ocean, where it can remain sequestered for centuries. This ocean pump is a powerful regulator of atmospheric carbon dioxide and an essential ingredient in any global climate forecast.
But a new MIT study points to a significant uncertainty in the way the biological pump is represented in climate models today. Researchers found that the “gold standard” equation used to calculate the pump’s strength has a larger margin of error than previously thought, and that predictions of how much atmospheric carbon the ocean will pump down to various depths could be off by 10 to 15 parts per million. ...
But in 2018, Cael and co-author Kelsey Bisson showed that the power law derived to explain the Martin curve was not the only equation that could fit the observations. The power law is a simple mathematical relationship that assumes that particles fall faster with depth. But Cael found that several other mathematical relationships, each based on different mechanisms for how marine snow sinks and is remineralized, could also explain the data. ..."

Unfortunately, this article appears not to provide a link to the underlying research study! Very regrettable! Quite an omission! Here is the article, I found:

From the research article's abstract:
"... However, the complexity and variability of processes involved introduces uncertainty in interpretation of transient observations and future climate projections. Much work has focused on “parametric uncertainty”, particularly determining the exponent(s) of a power‐law relationship of sinking particle flux with depth. Varying this relationship's functional form introduces additional “structural uncertainty”. We use an ocean biogeochemistry model substituting six alternative remineralization profiles fit to a reference power‐law curve, to systematically characterize structural uncertainty, which, in atmospheric pCO2 terms, is roughly 50% of parametric uncertainty associated with varying the power‐law exponent within its plausible global range, and similar to uncertainty associated with regional variation in power‐law exponents. The substantial contribution of structural uncertainty to total uncertainty highlights the need to improve characterization of biological pump processes, and compare the performance of different profiles within Earth System Models to obtain better constrained climate projections."

Study reveals uncertainty in how much carbon the ocean absorbs over time | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Climate projections could be off by five years, researchers find.

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