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Carbon dioxide (CO 2) is of particular interest in polar meteorology because it affects the melting of sea ice. Human activity releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning oil, coal and natural gas. A dozen kilograms of Arctic sea ice disappears for every kilogram of carbon dioxide released.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentrations from 1958 to 2023. The Keeling Curve is a graph of the annual variation and overall accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day.
During this time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has varied between 180 and 210 ppm during ice ages, increasing to 280–300 ppm during warmer interglacials. [115] [116] CO 2 mole fractions in the atmosphere have gone up by around 35 percent since the 1900s, rising from 280 parts per million by volume to 387 parts per million in 2009.
For comparison, in the northern hemisphere, the arctic sea ice has shrunk between 1979 and 2015 by 1.43x10 12 m 2 at maxima and 2.52x10 12 m 2 at minima, for an average of almost 2x10 12 m 2, [6] which is 0.4% of Earth's total surface of 510x10 12 m 2. At this time the global temperature rose by ~0.6 °C.
Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science and describes how much Earth's surface will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentration. [1] [2] Its formal definition is: "The change in the surface temperature in response to a change in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentration or other radiative ...
The atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases due to human activity has grown especially rapidly during the last several decades (since about year 1950). For carbon dioxide, the 50% increase (C/C 0 = 1.5) realized as of year 2020 since 1750 corresponds to a cumulative radiative forcing change (delta F) of +2.17 W/m 2. [6]
Every month a polar climate has an average temperature of less than 10 °C (50 °F). Regions with a polar climate cover more than 20% of the Earth's area. Most of these regions are far from the equator and near the poles , and in this case, winter days are extremely short and summer days are extremely long (they could last for the entirety of ...
The two main carbon isotopes are 12 C and 13 C. Plants absorb the lighter isotope, 12 C, more readily than 13 C. [25] Because fossil fuels originate mainly from plant matter, the 13 C/ 12 C ratio in the atmosphere falls when large amounts of fossil fuels are burned, releasing 12 C.