NOAA Greenhouse Gas trends over time

These trends are fairly well known and understood by now, but I hadn't seen this particular link before. My father, Brian Grothaus, sent this to me a few weeks ago:




Click on the link for more video images. You can watch CO2 concentrations rise and fall over time over different latitudes. The higher latitudes have more landmasses hence more humans and plants. Humans add CO2 and plants reduce it. The reason for the seasonal up and down is that plants work harder in some seasons than others whereas humans pump out CO2 at a relatively smoother rate.

The CO2C13 graph (you'll need to click through to see this one) is particularly interesting. C13 is a rarish (1%) isotope of carbon that has an extra neutron, so I assume CO2C13 is the amount of CO2 with C13 isotype atoms. Here is my guess on the relevance of this graph: One of the interesting properties of C13 is that virtually no plants can absorb it. Corn is the big exception(possibly also sugarcane, not sure), but corn is only extensively present in recent history with farming. So, if most prehistoric plants don't have C13 in them, then most prehistoric animals won't either and hence nearly no fossil fuels will have C13 in them. So, if CO2 is rising but CO2C13 isn't, then you can attribute the increase solely to fossil fuels or massive burning of non-corn plant matter.

Either way, I like data and graphs, this was a fun one. Thanks Dad!