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Earth science

The balance of the carbon budget

Nature volume 488, pages 35–36 (2012)Cite this article

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Careful analysis reveals that the global uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions by carbon sinks has doubled during the past 50 years — but the fractions of this absorbed by land and by sea remain unclear. See Letter p.70

Precisely quantifying the fate of man-made carbon dioxide is vital for reliably estimating future atmospheric CO2 levels and the contribution of this greenhouse gas to global climatic change. There has been much debate about whether currently active carbon sinks are likely to change drastically in the near future1, or might already have weakened during the past few decades2,3. On page 70 of this issue, Ballantyne and colleagues4 clarify matters. By calculating the worldwide increase in the atmospheric CO2 burden during the past 50 years from precise global observations, and by carefully accounting for anthropogenic carbon sources and their uncertainties, they find that total global carbon sinks have not declined during this period. Rather, they have increased more than twofold — although fossil-fuel CO2 emissions have risen almost fourfold5,6 over this time.

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Figure 1: Partial absorption of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.

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  1. Ingeborg Levin is at the Institut fär Umweltphysik, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg D-69120, Germany.

    Ingeborg Levin

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  1. Ingeborg Levin
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Correspondence to Ingeborg Levin.

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Levin, I. The balance of the carbon budget. Nature 488, 35–36 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/488035a

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