Authors of a new scientific study, including a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are forecasting that carbon dioxide pollution could cause climate-change related problems for thousands of years.
The researchers looked at chemical models that show how long carbon stays in the atmosphere and at data projections for rates of carbon pollution over the next three centuries. Shaun Marcott, a UW-Madison geoscience professor, said that even if the pollution loading stops by the year 2300, enough carbon will remain to continue to cause global temperature and sea level problems for up to 10,000 years.
”If a policymaker would ask me what’s the bottom line here, I would say, ‘Whatever we’re going to do, we can’t wait 100 to 200 years in the future. We need to moving quickly to a solution here,’” he said.
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Marcott said he and his co-authors assumed no technological fixes, like sending carbon emissions underground, in their calculations.
The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
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