Climate Change - Charting the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising.

It is named after the scientist who first produced accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the air - Charles David Keeling.  


Charles David Keeling in the lab.

Keeling's collection of data began in 1958.

Concentration is measured in parts per million (ppm)

Ice core data shows humans have never breathed air containing so much CO2.


Since Keeling began recording, CO2 has risen from 318 ppm to 400 ppm... a rise of around 25%. 

 The fastest rise of CO2 in the air seen in the ice core record (800,000 years) is 20 ppm in 1000 years.
There is evidence that CO2 has never risen so fast since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

 The CO2 level in the atmosphere is now rising at around 20 ppm per decade.

Carbon reacts with oxygen when fossil fuels are burned.


Each carbon atom joins with two oxygen atoms to make a carbon dioxide molecule. 

Measurements show that this is reducing the oxygen in the air as time passes.
Several scientific organisations measure the gases in the air.

One major set of measurements are from a laboratory in Hawaii.

This is all evidence that extra carbon dioxide in the air comes from burning fossil fuels. 

We are time-warping vast amounts of ancient carbon (which we are combining with current oxygen) into the modern atmosphere.

In 2010 about 9 Gigatonnes of Carbon (GtC) were emitted from burning fossil fuels, as 33 Gigatonnes of CO2 gas.

How much is 33 Gigatonnes? 
33 billion tonnes or 33,000,000,000,000,000 grams.
9 Gigatonnes of carbon weighs about the same as 132 billion people. 

Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change - The link with mass extinctions

Image
What is the worst-case scenario for climate change? The geological record shows that when the atmosphere suddenly changes, there are big effects on living things. Five major  mass extinction  events are recorded in the rock record of the last 600 million years. The biggest extinction was at the end of the  Permian , around 252 million years ago. It is called the  End-Permian mass extinction. Only about 8% of species survived to live on in the Triassic Period. This photo shows geologists investigating tilted sedimentary rocks at Shangsi in South China. Triassic rocks (at the top right) lie over the older Permian rocks. Each mass extinction in the rocks matches with a change in the chemistry of the rocks called a ' carbon excursion '. Some of the carbon excursions are 'negative CEs' and some are 'positive CEs'. Negative CEs  indicate that lots of gaseous carbon compounds escaped into the air, causing warming. These are sometime...
Read more

Climate Change - The Greenhouse Effect

Image
What do scientists mean by the " Greenhouse Effect "? When the Sun's energy arrives at the Earth, it travels through the air. Some is reflected back to space, but some hits the Earth and warms it. The warm Earth gives off  infrared radiation  with various wavelengths.   Some of those waves can pass back out of the air to space, but some are absorbed by certain gases in the air. The gases then re-emit the energy into the air. If there are more of those gases, less heat escapes into space. An extreme case has happened on Venus. Concentrated  'greenhouse gases'  on Venus have caused the surface temperature to rise to 735  Kelvin  (462 degrees C; around 900 degrees F) Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen quickly  since people began burning large quantities of fossil fuels. There was carbon dioxide in the air before that, at around 270 parts per million. Without any carbon dioxide, the Earth wo...
Read more

Climate Change - Coal and carbon dioxide

Image
Coal, oil and natural gas are  fossil fuels . When they are burned, they  change the Earth's atmosphere. How is that possible?       C oal  is a good example. Coal was formed  hundreds of millions of years ago . Geologists say that a three-metre (10-foot) coal seam took between  12,000 and 60,000 years  to form . Ancient trees and other plants lived, died and were fossilised. All those plants took  carbon dioxide  out of the atmosphere.  Some larger coal seams are, for example, 10 metres thick. They took around  40,000 years to form,  but have been mined and burned in a little over  100 years. The fastest rise of CO 2  in the air seen in   the ice core record (800,000 years)  is  20 ppm in 1000 years. The CO 2  level in the atmosphere is now rising at around  20 ppm per decade . The  carbon  joins up with  oxygen  when it burns. Eac...
Read more