A brief history of the International Carbon Dioxide Conferences
The CO2 conferences form a series bringing
together scientists to communicate the most recent results pertinent to the
global carbon cycle, with special emphasis on the current increase of atmospheric
CO2. These international meetings take place once every four
years. The World Meteorological Organization has been a sponsor of most of the
events. The next meeting has been scheduled for 25-30 September, 2005, near Boulder,
Colorado.
The first meeting took place in 1981 in Bern, Switzerland, and
was called the "Bern CO2 Symposium". The University of Bern and
the WMO sponsored the event. About 40 scientists attended. The meeting's
focus was strongly on atmospheric measurements of CO2 and related
species, with some attention to model estimates of oceanic and terrestrial CO2
uptake. A series of papers from the meeting was published in a special issue
of Journal of Geophysical Research in 1983, coordinated by C.D. Keeling.
The second meeting, the "International Conference on
Atmospheric CO2" took place in Kandersteg, Switzerland, in September
1985. It was sponsored by the Commission on Atmospheric Chemistry and Global
Pollution of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric
Physics. About 60 scientists attended. In addition to atmospheric
measurements of CO2 and its isotopic ratios, attention was given to
new measurements of historical CO2 in ice cores, and more emphasis
on the terrestrial biosphere, air-sea gas exchange, and 3-dimensional transport
modeling. A series of papers was published as a special issue in Tellus, 1987,
with C.D. Keeling and U. Siegenthaler as guest editors.
The Third International Conference on Analysis and
Evaluation of Atmospheric CO2 Data Past and Present was held in Hinterzarten,
Germany, in October, 1989. It was sponsored primarily by the University of Heidelberg
and the WMO. There were about 120 participants. Exciting new ice core data
were presented. The evidence for a large carbon sink on land in the northern
hemisphere was first presented. In addition to the subjects of the second
meeting, new attention was given to ocean biota, and an entire session was
devoted to the modeling of oceanic CO2 uptake and transport. Papers
were published in a special issue of Tellus, 1991, with I. Levin and P. Tans as
guest editors.
The Fourth International CO2 Conference was held
in Carqueiranne, France, in September 1993, and sponsored by WMO and several
French organizations. About 200 scientists attended the meeting and more than
150 papers and posters were presented. There were sessions on atmospheric
measurements, oceanic measurements, process models and carbon transport models
in both environments, terrestrial observations and ecosystem models, ice core
data, and isotopic ratio observations. An important issue during the
conference was the observed slowdown of the rate of CO2 accumulation
in the atmosphere observed in 1992 and 1993. Papers were published in a
special issue of Tellus, 1995, with I. Fung and L. Merlivat as guest editors.
The Fifth International CO2 Conference took place
in Cairns, Australia, in September 1997. It was organized by the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, and sponsored by
the WMO, with various other organizations making a financial contribution.
About 200 scientists attended, and about 200 oral and poster presentations were
given. The new measurements of atmospheric oxygen played an important role at
the meeting. Results of measurements of terrestrial carbon fluxes through the
eddy covariance method were presented for the first time. There were sessions
on atmospheric measurements, including isotopic ratios, and inverse models
(which deduce sources and sinks from observed concentration patterns), on
oceanic measurements and models, on terrestrial land use as well as
fertilization of the biosphere, on ecosystem models, on ice core measurements,
carbon cycle synthesis models, and a little about future CO2
projections. Papers were published in a special issue in Tellus, 1999, with R.
Francey, M. Apps, F. Joos, D. Schimel, and A. Watson as guest editors.
The Sixth International CO2 Conference took place
in Sendai, Japan, in October 2001. It was organized by Tohoku University and
sponsored by the WMO and various Japanese organizations, with financial
contributions from a number of Japanese corporations. There were approximately
300 oral and poster presentations, by about the same number of attendees. The
meeting witnessed an enormous expansion in the use of inverse models in both
the atmospheric and oceanic domains, reflecting the continuing increase in the
density of observations, as well as the rapidly increasing capabilities of
computers. Remote sensing, including the potential of direct retrievals of
atmospheric CO2 from space, played a much bigger role than in
previous conferences. Of course, all major topics of previous conferences
continued to receive attention. Papers were again published in a special issue
of Tellus, 2003, with P. Tans, T. Nakazawa, and H. Yoshikawa Inoue as guest
editors.
Format of the meetings
All oral sessions have been plenary in every conference,
with the length of the oral presentations 30 minutes at the Cairns meeting, and
20 minutes at the Sendai meeting, except for invited presentations that were
given 40 minutes in Sendai. The advantage of plenary sessions is that all
participants have an excellent opportunity to stay abreast of developments
outside their own specialty. In Cairns all posters stayed up for several
days, in Sendai for one day because of lack of space. In the latter case the
poster sessions highlighted different topics on different days. There has
always been a generous amount of time for poster sessions completely separate
from the oral sessions.
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