Addendum to: Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02074-3, published online 12 August 2024.
The yearly increase in atmospheric CO2 due to Arctic coastal erosion (up to 7–13 TgC per year in SSP5-8.5) is between three and four orders of magnitude smaller than anthropogenic CO2 emissions, currently estimated at about 10 PgC per year1 (1 Pg = 1,000 Tg). The rate of increase in the atmospheric CO2 due to erosion increases with warming, which configures a positive climate feedback. The climate feedback from Arctic coastal erosion is two orders of magnitude smaller than the current central estimates of the surface albedo feedback (e.g., melting sea ice), and the cloud feedback (see Table 7.10 in IPCC AR6 WGI, Chapter 7 (ref. 2)). Any impact of Arctic coastal erosion on the global climate through increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations until 2100 is therefore comparatively small.
We find the above context important for the correct interpretation of our results, especially given the response we received after publication.
Moreover in the introduction, the sentence that originally read “More than 90% of the ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2 occurs in polar and subpolar regions” has been amended to “More than 90% of the coastal ocean uptake of atmospheric CO2 occurs in polar and subpolar regions”, referring to the work of Dai et al.3. We thank Jean-Pierre Gattuso for bringing this to our attention.
References
Friedlingstein, P. et al. Global carbon budget 2023. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 15, 5301–5369 (2023).
Forster, P. et al. The Earth’s energy budget, climate feedbacks and climate sensitivity. in Climate Change 2021—The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds Masson-Delmotte, V. et al.) 923–1054 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Dai, M. et al. Carbon fluxes in the coastal ocean: synthesis, boundary processes, and future trends. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 50, 593–626 (2022).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Nielsen, D.M., Chegini, F., Maerz, J. et al. Addendum: Reduced Arctic Ocean CO2 uptake due to coastal permafrost erosion. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 1003 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02133-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02133-9
