Climate Alarmists: 'OMG, The Arctic Might Soon Start Emitting Carbon Vs. Absorbing It' Same Alarmists: 'Oops, The Arctic Is Absorbing Much More Carbon Than We Thought'

In the whacky world of climate alarmism pseudoscience, things change quickly, and sometimes, not so quickly. Let me give you an example. Three years ago, ‘experts’ were warning that the Arctic was flipping from being a carbon sink into becoming a net carbon emitter. Said New Scientist at the time:

The Arctic has begun releasing more carbon than it is absorbing. The change is a result of climate change thawing frozen ground, and the problem is expected to get much worse as the world warms further.

Previously it appeared some sites in the Arctic had already flipped from being carbon sinks into sources of emissions, but research now shows the phenomenon has happened across the region as a whole.

This falls into the climate pseudoscience category of It’s worse than we thought, where climate change (TM) provokes unexpected feedbacks which cause even more climate change (TM) and eventually you end up in a Thermageddon death spiral, the only means of avoidance of which is to stop traveling, stop eating meat and dairy, start eating bugs, decimate all industry and the economy and stop heating your home in winter or cooling it in summer.

The Nature article published 21st October 2019 says:

Warming in the Arctic is causing soils to decompose more rapidly, even during winter. Now, estimates of winter carbon dioxide loss indicate that it can offset carbon gains during the growing season, meaning that the region is a source of carbon.

Newsweek reports:

The Arctic regions have historically acted as carbon sinks, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and trapping carbon in permafrost (or frozen soil), thus taking in more greenhouse gasses than they release.

This has been the norm for tens of thousands of years. However, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature, this precedent may be about to change—if it hasn't already. Emission data shows that the thawing of permafrost is turning these areas from carbon sinks into carbon emitters.

Researchers found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate (RCP 8.5), carbon dioxide "lost" from permafrost each winter could increase 41 percent by the end of the century. Under a more moderate climate scenario (RCPb 4.5), it is still predicted to increase by a hefty 17 percent.

This takes the climate crisis Frightnight message one stage further by claiming that if we carry on emitting GHGs at the current rate, the Arctic will start adding to our own carbon emissions by increasing its carbon output by 41% by 2100! OMG! Catastrophe! Just one slight problem here: even the uber alarmists at the BBC admit that RCP8.5 is a totally unrealistic emissions scenario and is not in any way representative of our current emissions or ‘business as usual’. The study authors probably also used climate models with implausibly high climate sensitivities to project this absurd increase in carbon emissions from a region which, at the time and even now, is a carbon sink.

So, fast forward 3 years and what do we have? Oops, an admission that, in fact the Arctic region is absorbing even more carbon than scientists previously thought it was (excepting those ‘experts’ who were telling us that the arctic was emitting carbon of course!). This falls into the climate alarmist pseudoscience category of Oops, it’s not as bad as we thought after all, abbreviated to Shit, scare tactics failed!

Accordingly, it’s taken four years for these scientists to report and publish the data they collected in 2018 and to which “the surprise was great”. One presumes that so surprised were they that they had to spend four years checking it, then publish it just after the COP27 meeting in Egypt where all those attending agreed that we must stop burning fossil fuels by next Tuesday and pay Third World countries ‘loss and damages’ for the nasty weather caused by our present and historic carbon emissions. I mean, it’s not like it might take the urgency off the crusade to decarbonise Western economies or anything, is it?

In light of this newly discovered mechanism, the Barents Sea -- already known to be the most productive marginal sea in the Arctic -- would appear to effectively remove roughly 30 percent more carbon from the atmosphere than previously believed. Moreover, model-based simulations determined that the outflow manifests in seasonal pulses, since in the Arctic's coastal seas, the absorption of CO2 by phytoplankton only takes place in summer.

Understanding transport and transformation processes within the carbon cycle is essential to creating global carbon dioxide budgets and therefore also projections for global warming.

You don’t say!

But it gets worse (or better, depending on your perspective). It’s not just the Barent’s Sea, it’s other regions in the Arctic and it’s also significant parts of the Antarctic too. The actual study says:

We could show that the co-location of dense water formation and transport with elevated biological production in the Barents Sea impacts the carbon budget of the Arctic Ocean by retaining substantial amounts of carbon in the deep Nansen Basin while providing a food source for deep sea organisms. The Barents Sea, however, is not the only shelf region with such co-location. For example, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea or around northern Greenland19,42 and, in particular, the Antarctic Ross43 and Weddell seas44,45,46 are characterized by dense water formation and primary production, and it is therefore probable that high carbon injection rates also occur there as well. Moreover, high-density bottom waters produced around Antarctica47 can lead to even deeper injection with longer retention times than reported here for the Arctic Ocean.

So let’s just imagine for a moment that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere released by human activity do critically affect the temperature of the planet. let’s just suppose that their pseudoscientific theory is correct, as they claim. In this case, their projected ‘catastrophic’ accumulations of carbon in the atmosphere are going to turn out to be greatly overestimated because the Arctic and Antarctic regions are absorbing and sequestering carbon in the deep oceans at a rate much greater than previously assumed.

But science and data account for little when you are determined to implement a globocapitalist/socialist/Marxist/fascist New World Order based on a couple of made up scare stories (a Covid ‘pandemic’ and a ‘climate crisis’). Spend your allocated digitalised carbon credits, get your up to date (out of date) mouse booster and be happy.