• Annual Reviews Congratulates John Hagan, Editor of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Co-Recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology 2009 Awarded for Research on Genocide Read More

Atmospheric Lifetime of Fossil-Fuel Carbon Dioxide
David Archer, Michael Eby, Kathy Tokos, Victor Brovkin, Andy Ridgwell, Long Cao, Uwe Mikolajewicz, Ken Caldeira, Katsumi Matsumoto, Guy Munhoven, Alvaro Montenegro
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Volume 37, May 2009

CO2 released from combustion of fossil fuels equilibrates between the various carbon reservoirs of the atmosphere, the ocean, and the terrestrial biosphere on time scales of a few centuries. However, a sizeable fraction of the CO2 remains in the atmosphere, awaiting a return to the solid earth by much slower weathering processes and deposition of CaCO3. Common measures of atmospheric CO2 lifetime, including the e-folding time scale, disregard the long tail. Its neglect in the calculation of global warming potentials leads many to underestimate the longevity of anthropogenic global warming. Here we review the past literature on the atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 and its impact on climate, and we present initial results from a model intercomparison project on this topic. The models agree that 20-35% of the CO2 remains in the atmosphere after equilibration with the ocean (2-20 centuries). Neutralization by CaCO3 draws the airborne fraction down further on time scales of 3-7 kyr.
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