CO2 Residence Time
Slide 28 in this series.
The residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere can be more specifically defined as the half-life in the atmosphere.
The graph below shows that there are a wide range of values put forth in the literature that are a great deal less than that used by the IPCC which uses values as high as 200 years. Salby makes an excellent case for the residence time of ACO2 to be 8 months. Using this value the equilibrium value for ACO2 is less than 8Gtons for an annual emission of 5.5Gtons.
For over 200 the value was computed to be 80Gtons, or about 10% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere.
NEXT: What have we learned about CO2 and its impact on the earth's climate?
The links below are to the pages or slides in this section, which covers the science of CO2.
