Earth System Science 1: Intro to ESS. Lecture 26. Why Climate Changes

UCI ESS 1: Introduction to Earth System Science (Fall 2013)
Lec 26. Introduction to Earth System Science -- Why Climate Changes --
View the complete course:
Instructor: Julie Ferguson, Ph.D.

License: Creative Commons CC-BY-SA

Description: Earth System Science covers the following topics: the origin and evolution of the Earth, atmosphere, oceans, perspective of biogeochemical cycles, energy use, and human impacts on the Earth system.

Recorded December 4, 2013.

[rewtnode]

Excellent lecture series. I followed some of them but not all.  In lecture 26 Julie holds the deniers' feet a little more to the fire, but it will probably only have the opposite effect on them. Data and showing their contradictions and falsifications of data and their misrepresenting theory is much more effective, which she already does most of the time, but there could be much more of that. 
 I think it would be useful to underpin the curve of raise of CO2 concentration with a simple calculation that compares how much carbon in actual metric tons was  measured to have entered the entire atmosphere annually, together with the calculation of how much carbon came directly from burning coal, oil and natural gas. Essentially this isn't about ppm's but instead about the flow of carbon measured directly in metric tons. The first can be computed by means of the molar weight of CO2 and a good estimate of the total mass of the atmosphere. The data for the size of the coal heap and oil pool should be available from the economic records by a number of countries, and I recall having seen a UN or IPCC  document that made a very good summary of this. I mean, wouldn't it be the most accurate and thus convincing account for the recent CO2 record if you can show essentially the pile of coal that was mined and burned each year?
The same could be done for CH4, but that's more complex because it's a mix of natural gas, cow farts and thawing of permafrost as well as release from methane-hydrate, and other processes, some not so well known, so the economic data are harder to put together.   

[qcislander]

"So what does this graph suggest to you?"

@30:30
It doesn't SUGGEST anything: is\t simply screams a-haut-voix (without looking farther than the end of the red line) that the graph excludes almost 30 years of publicly available data

I saw that immediately, and I'm not the least bit surprised at learning the graph's source.