If Anthropogenic CO<sub>2</sub> Emissions Cease, Will Atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> Concentration Continue to Increase?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If anthropogenic CO 2 emissions were to suddenly cease, the evolution of the atmospheric CO 2 concentration would depend on the magnitude and sign of natural carbon sources and sinks. Experiments using Earth system models indicate that the overall carbon sinks dominate, such that upon the cessation of anthropogenic emissions, atmospheric CO 2 levels decrease over time. However, these models have typically neglected the permafrost carbon pool, which has the potential to introduce an additional terrestrial source of carbon to the atmosphere. Here, the authors use the University of Victoria Earth System Climate Model (UVic ESCM), which has recently been expanded to include permafrost carbon stocks and exchanges with the atmosphere. In a scenario of zeroed CO 2 and sulfate aerosol emissions, whether the warming induced by specified constant concentrations of non-CO 2 greenhouse gases could slow the CO 2 decline following zero emissions or even reverse this trend and cause CO 2 to increase over time is assessed. It is found that a radiative forcing from non-CO 2 gases of approximately 0.6 W m −2 results in a near balance of CO 2 emissions from the terrestrial biosphere and uptake of CO 2 by the oceans, resulting in near-constant atmospheric CO 2 concentrations for at least a century after emissions are eliminated. At higher values of non-CO 2 radiative forcing, CO 2 concentrations increase over time, regardless of when emissions cease during the twenty-first century. Given that the present-day radiative forcing from non-CO 2 greenhouse gases is about 0.95 W m −2 , the results suggest that if all CO 2 and aerosols emissions were eliminated without also decreasing non-CO 2 greenhouse gas emissions CO 2 levels would increase over time, resulting in a small increase in climate warming associated with this positive permafrost–carbon feedback.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".