PHY 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Emission Intensity, Positive Feedback, Negative Feedback
11 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
An el nino year is a year that is abnormally hot and must be taken with a grain of salt when evaluating climate change. We can measure the temperature/composition of air in the world thousands of years ago by drilling into ice caps, removing an ice core, measuring composition of trapped ice and using geology. Industrialization strongly correlated with the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. We know fossil fuels are a huge cause because we find the carbon isotopes in the atmosphere that are only made by fossil fuels. There are some natural collectors of co2 like forests, micro activity in soil and oceans. +soil and oceans can be saturated with co2 so they can only take so much. +forests are being destroyed for industrial development so we are losing much of our co2 natural sinks. Greenhouse gas emissions in the usa have seen a recent down turn. Nitrous oxide levels are falling because of better technological efficiency.
