Warmer Temperatures from Carbon Dioxide are Felt a Decade After Release

It turns out that it takes just a decade for a single emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) to have its maximum warming effect on the Earth. The findings have major implications for future warming as human-created CO2 emissions continue to be released.

"Amazingly, despite many decades of climate science, there has never been a study focused on how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of carbon dioxide, taking carbon-climate uncertainties into consideration," said Katharine Ricke, lead author of the new study, in a news release. "A lot of climate scientists may have an intuition about how long it takes to feel the warming from a particular emission of CO2, but that intuition might be a little bit out of sync with our best estimates from today's climate and carbon cycle models."

In order to calculate the effect of CO2, the researchers combined information about the Earth's carbon cycle-specifically, how quickly the ocean and biosphere took up a large pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere-with information about the Earth's climate system taken from a group of climate models used in the latest IPCC assessment.

In the end, the researchers found that the median time between a single CO2 emission and maximum warming was 10.1 years. This reaffirmed the fact that warming persists for more than a century.

So why this time lag? It's due to the fact that upper layers of the ocean take longer to heat up than the atmosphere. As the oceans take up more heat, the overall climate warms up.

"Our results show that people alive today are very likely to benefit from emissions avoided today and that these will not accrue solely to impact future generations," said Ricke. "Our findings should dislodge previous misconceptions about this timeframe that have played a key part in the failure to reach policy consensus."

The findings are published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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