Earth & Sky

Atmospheric gas study shows carbon rise in 2007

Pieter Tans: One ppm sounds like a small amount, one part per million, but it’s an awful lot of stuff.

That’s atmospheric scientist Pieter Tans of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, in Boulder Colorado. What he’s talking about are molecules of carbon dioxide, CO2, in our atmosphere. Tans and his colleagues found that during 2007, CO2 amounts in Earth’s atmosphere inflated by about 2.2 parts per million, or 17 billion tons. Tans thinks he knows why.

Pieter Tans: It is directly related with the rate at which the world is burning fossil fuels, meaning coal, oil, and natural gas. And the rate with which we’re doing that has increased recently by more than three percent per year on average for the last seven or eight years.

Tans said that CO2, the main greenhouse gas, has increased in concentration by 100 parts per million since the industrial revolution of the 1850s. And that has affected how our atmosphere absorbs the sun’s infrared radiation.

Pieter Tans: So the whole heat balance is different today from what it was in 1850 and before. And this is what is driving climate change.

And another greenhouse gas, methane, rose by 27 million tons.

Year-to-year changes this century in Earth’s climate have so far been relatively small. But Tans and other scientists are worried about warming trends in the Arctic, where huge amounts of organic materials have for thousands of years been in a sort of deep-freeze.

Pieter Tans: And so in a sense, it’s being taken out of the deep-freeze which means microbes can feast on that and turn that organic material into either methane or CO2 which are both greenhouse gases.

Our thanks to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.