ENVIRON 157 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Carbon Cycle, Radiative Forcing, Climate Summit
Document Summary
Co2 absorption of sea water was only 10%. The photo in the background shows the mauna loa observatory at dusk (courtesy forrest mims). The gray saw-toothed line shows actual measurements and the red line shows the running mean value. Level of co2 was constantly increasing since the 1950s. The top trend line shows human population growth from the year 1000 to 2000. The three graphs in the middle show concentrations in the lower atmosphere of the three most abundant human-emitted greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. The purple line in the bottom graph shows a model prediction of global mean surface temperature, with the light shaded area indicating the margin of uncertainty. The gray line superimposed beginning in year 1880 shows the observed global mean surface temperature. Note the very good agreement between the model prediction and observations. Population doubled & then doubled again over the last century from 1. 65 billion to more than 6 billion inhabitants.
