Clive Best has done a great (the Best?) post on a complicated topic: Earth’s cycling of carbon, especially CO2 through natural sinks and sources, including humans burning fossil fuels. I have read many posts and papers on this, along with long argumentative threads, hoping against hope I could understand and write something half as clear as he has done.

The article is Carbon Recyling at his blog (here)

Some Excerpts to encourage you to go and read the whole thing:

If you sum up all the sources and sinks then you find that about half man-made emissions are being absorbed each year. That means that only about half of the CO2 emitted by humans remains in the atmosphere. The strange thing is that this ratio hasn’t changed at all in 50 years, despite rapid increases in emissions.

Today we are emitting about twice as much carbon dioxide as we did 30 years ago, yet only half of it survives a full year. That means that currently, an amount of carbon dioxide equal to the total annual emissions of 30 years ago is being absorbed each year. Why is this and what does it mean? Part of the answer lies with the greening of the earth, but far more importantly the answer lies in how the oceans are responding.

There are 3 independent Carbon cycles which in total must balance.
1. Dissolution/Absorption of CO2 at  Ocean surfaces.
2. Biological re-cycling of CO2
3. Geological re-cycling of CO2

Increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere therefore causes the oceans to take up (inhale) more carbon dioxide. Because the oceans surface layer mixes slowly with the deep ocean (hundreds of years) the increased carbon dioxide content of the surface ocean will be mixed very slowly into the large carbon reservoir of the deep ocean. The rate of our adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is too fast for the deep ocean to be a significant reservoir. So as the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rises, so too does the concentration in the ocean surface.

The total mass of living plants and animals and carbon in soil, at any given time represents a temporary store of carbon. This is comparable to the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere. Life thrives in warmer climates with higher CO2 levels and suffers during colder more arid glacial periods with  low CO2.

SiO2 and CaCO3 are insoluble and will settle to the ocean floor where they are moved by plate tectonics to subduction zones, carried deep into the Earth and heated converting them back into metamorphic rocks and releasing carbon dioxide. When these rocks and their associated carbon encounter Volcanic eruptions or Mid Ocean vents they return the CO2 to the atmosphere, thus ending the cycle.

Just how confident  are climate scientists that they really understand the carbon cycle? Can they, for example, explain why lower levels of CO2 occurred during ice ages? This is what AR5 says on the matter.

AR5: “All of the major drivers of the glacial-to-interglacial atmospheric CO2 changes (Figure 6.5) are likely to have already been identified. However, Earth System Models have been unable to reproduce the full magnitude of the glacial-to-interglacial CO2 changes. Significant uncertainties exist in glacial boundary conditions and on some of the primary controls on carbon storage in the ocean and in the land. These uncertainties prevent an unambiguous attribution of individual mechanisms as controllers of the low glacial CO2 concentrations.”

So the simple answer is no they don’t really understand the carbon cycle. Nor can they determine why CO2 levels in the atmosphere are naturally so low at <0.03%. A proper understanding of the carbon cycle should at least be able to determine why 280ppm is the natural level for today’s climate. I think this is the fundamental challenge for Carbon Cycle modellers.

Conclusion

In my opinion the BERN model has a logical flaw. It assumes that a fixed 22% of the Anthropogenic increase in CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for  geological weathering – but why would it?  What possible justification is there to image that  it is a fixed percentage,  independent of amplitude?

It is only when the partial pressures of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the ocean re-balances that a new ‘geological’ balance of CO2 be reached. That happens rather fast and the net increase is small compared to glacial cycle variations, which as we have seen, climate scientists don’t yet understand.
 
See Also  Carbon Sense and Nonsense (Viv Forbes), and
Much Ado about CO2 (Murry Salby)