Carbon and climate system coupling on timescales from the Precambrian to the Anthropocene
Date
2007-05-29Metadata
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https://hdl.handle.net/1912/1942Abstract
The global carbon and climate systems are closely intertwined, with
biogeochemical processes responding to and driving climate variations. Over a range of
geological and historical time-scales, warmer climate conditions are associated with
higher atmospheric levels of CO2, an important climate-modulating greenhouse gas. The
atmospheric CO2-temperature relationship reflects two dynamics, the planet’s climate
sensitivity to a perturbation in atmospheric CO2 and the stability of non-atmospheric
carbon reservoirs to evolving climate. Both exhibit non-linear behavior, and coupled
carbon-climate interactions have the potential to introduce both stabilizing and
destabilizing feedback loops into the Earth System. Here we bring together evidence
from a wide range of geological, observational, experimental and modeling studies on the
dominant interactions between the carbon cycle and climate. The review is organized by
time-scale, spanning interannual to centennial climate variability, Holocene millennial
variations and Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, and million year and longer
variations over the Precambrian and Phanerozoic. Our focus is on characterizing and,
where possible quantifying, the emergent behavior internal to the coupled carbon-climate
system as well as the responses of the system to external forcing from tectonics, orbital
dynamics, catastrophic events, and anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions. While there are
many unresolved uncertainties and complexity in the carbon cycle, one emergent
property is clear across time scales: while CO2 can increase in the atmosphere quickly,
returning to lower levels through natural processes is much slower, so the consequences
of the human perturbation will far outlive the emissions that caused them.
Description
Author Posting. © Annual Reviews, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Annual Reviews for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32 (2007): 31-66, doi:10.1146/annurev.energy.32.041706.124700.