Natural Carbon Dioxide

As I touched on in my analogy post, most of the carob dioxide in the atmosphere is natural. Now I would like to take the time to expand on that idea and show some interesting information I found about the natural amount being increased. After all, carbon dioxide is the most talked about greenhouse gas, so I think I should talk about it some more too.

Thinking back to when I watched An Inconvenient Truth, I have noticed one part of Al Gore’s power point that does not make too much sense to me according to what scientists say about global warming. This was his graph that showed that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has always been changing at the same rate as temperature (at least over the hundreds of thousands of years the scientists claim to have data on). However, my question is, how did the amount of CO2 change so much without human intervention? Well, in my search for more information about natural carbon dioxide, I ran upon a new source of information, a climatologist named Dr. Roy Spencer. In one of his articles online, he talks about how an increase in temperature can cause an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This would explain my question to Al Gore’s graph. The carbon dioxide followed so closely because the environment is causing it to increase. As you can see in the following graph, there is a lot of natural variance in the amount of carbon dioxide that greatly varies from the variance of human emissions.

Now this next graph (which I know is really hard to understand) shows that carbon dioxide increases tend to follow behind temperature increases, especially since the maximum correlation of the rate of change of carbon dioxide to temperature is at zero.

Now I know that this seems surprising, it was a surprising find for me too. However, this claim does make sense to me. It seems to fit greatly with the data. I found this information at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/increasing-atmospheric-co2-manmade%E2%80%A6or-natural/

I hope you all find it interesting.