The article at your link says the oceans absorbed more CO2 than ever last year - 2.3 billion tons. The "decrease" is only a decrease as a proportion of total CO2 emissions. It doesn't suggest that the ocean is reaching a saturation point and will cease to function as a natural sink, just that it didn't match emissions pound for pound.
What?
Maybe. What would have caused the CO2 levels to rise enough to cause a 6-degree temperature increase at a time when no one was burning fossil fuels? Isn't it true that the data suggests that rising CO2 levels during interglacials follow rising temperatures rather than leading them? Maybe it shows the sensitivity to some factor no one has considered yet, which drives both temperature increase and (later) CO2 increase as well. I'm not saying the rise in CO2 wouldn't have its own contribution to rising temperatures, but the fact that temperatures naturally rise during interglacial periods when there are no man-made greenhouse gases being produced makes me cautious about saying any rise we're currently observing must be primarily due to man-made greenhouse gases.
Again, maybe. Unless we know what caused the rise during the last interglacial, it's speculation to say that the same factors are at work today in the same measure. It could be less, it could be more.
I really don't care for your tone. If you can demonstrate that you're capable of having a civil conversation, maybe we can have one. If not, I won't be baited, your sputtering cartoon comments will simply be ignored.
Knowledgerush encyclopedia has been upgraded to a 33 x GWP? Wow, I'll bet that will really improve their response time.
Ah, I think I see the source of our misunderstanding. Your Nature article says "For practical purposes, 500 to 1000 years is 'forever'". I was using the term "forever" to mean something a bit longer than that.
Indeed it is. A fact known to every climatologist, and anyone who has bothered to educate themselves on the subject.
Or maybe it's due to the factor that the climatologists have considered and say it is due to. Namely that carbon dioxide is soluble in water, but more soluble in cold water than warm water. So as the world warms or cools as a result of any external forcing (e.g. the Milankovitch cycles that drive the ice ages) the oceans start to warm/cool until eventually they start to release/absorb CO2, starting a positive feedback that amplifies the warming/cooling.
Makes sense. Do they also have an explanation for the "spiking" mentioned in the article?
I don't know. I know the oceanic CO2 positive feedback is invoked to explain the amplitude of changes in temperature that take place over tens of thousands of years, but shorter scale variations probably pose different, thornier, questions. I imagine that volcanism might explain some of them, but that's just a guess.
According to the article, the percentage of of total carbon absorbed by the ocean is declining because the total is expanding. The amount of carbon which the ocean absorbs is still increasing, according to their calculations. There is no inflection point in the graph accompanying the paper; the ocean carbon sink line still seems to be showing an increase in the rate at which the ocean is absorbing carbon, not merely an increase in the amount absorbed (the line is exponential rather than linear). The problem they allege is that the rate at which carbon is being emitted is increasing even faster -- it's also exponential, but with a bigger exponent.
I think you have me confused with someone else, but my memory may have failed me. Feel free to point out where this has been explained to me in detail.
A detailed explanation of why the CO2 rise lags, rather than leads, temperature in past natural warmings has been given many times in these threads; I've given it several times myself. Of course there are a lot of AGW threads, so it's possible you missed it every time. A quick search for Milankovitch found dozens of threads, too many to easily find my own posts giving the explanation, though I did spot this:
