Seeing the environmental forest

Yes, I'm still around. I've just been fairly busy the past few months. The long-debunked myth that Mt. Etna emits more carbon dioxide in one little eruption than human activities have for our entire history as a species has recently reappeared on my social media feed, courtesy of a right-wing cousin of mine.  I just thought I'd do a quick comparison showing just how wrong that myth is. Using data from tables 2 and 3 in Burton, Sawyer, and Granieri (2013) for volcanic emissions and Boden, Marland, and Andres (2017) for human-related carbon dioxide emissions, I get the following comparison between an entire year's worth of Mt. Etna CO 2 emissions and just one year's worth of human-caused CO 2 emissions. Mt. Etna produces an average of 7.22 million metric tons of CO 2 per year. That's TOTAL per year, not just "one little burp." In contrast, humans caused 36.14 BILLION metric tons of CO 2 emissions in 2014 alone. Mt. Etna emissions aren...

With the completion of yet another circle around the sun, it's time to take stock of where we're headed with global climate.  I'm going to do something that is somewhat risky—extend statistical models beyond the data range that was used to create them, but necessary if we want to see where current trends will take us in the future.

This one is for those of you who were daydreaming through biology class at the end of the school year (you know who you are).  The carbon cycle is one of several ecological cycles we're currently messing up, along with the phosphorus cycle and nitrogen cycle (more on that one in a later post).  Just in case you've forgotten what the carbon cycle is, here's a diagram summarizing it:

One of the persistent issues bedeviling public understanding of global warming is the apparent disconnect between CO 2 levels and global temperatures since 1998.  Skeptics claim that warming has slowed since 1998 while CO 2 has risen at an increasing rate.  At first glance, they might have a point—but only at first glance.  Here is the 12-month running average of Mauna Loa CO 2 measurements and GISS surface temperatures:

In the last three posts, I've examined the evidence that the Earth is warming and that the warming is due to CO 2 .  Continuing this series, today I'll look at the evidence that shows that humans are behind the increase in CO 2 .

After Joseph Fourier deduced the existence of the greenhouse effect in the 1820s, it took until 1861 before John Tyndall identified the first components of the greenhouse effect as water vapor and CO 2 ( Tyndall 1861 ).  One hundred fifty-two years of research later, we know far more about the absorptive properties of  CO 2  and other greenhouse gases , including water vapor, including how they affect Earth's infrared spectrum.