Southern Ocean back in business as a carbon sink (models were wrong)

The Southern Ocean absorbs 40% of the global oceanic uptake in CO2. For most of the last ten years researchers thought it was weaker, or at “saturation” point and not able to absorb more CO2. Instead, it looks like it has been absorbing more again and by the year 2010 was back up to full power. This means there was a lot more natural variation than scientists (and their models) thought.The GCM’s are meant to be coupled ocean and atmosphere models, but they don’t understand the ocean part.

Back in 2007, New Scientist declared the slowdown has “far reaching implications”, things were worse than the IPCC’s projections. Things were 20 years ahead of the IPCC’s schedule and it was “scary”:

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