Following Carbon Dioxide Through the Atmosphere

Carbon dioxide plays a significant role in trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. The gas is released from human activities like burning fossil fuels, and the concentration of carbon dioxide moves and changes through the seasons.

Using observations from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite, scientists developed a model of the behavior of carbon in the atmosphere from Sept. 1, 2014, to Aug. 31, 2015.

Scientists can use models like this one to better understand and predict where concentrations of carbon dioxide could be especially high or low, based on activity on the ground.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Kathryn Mersmann & Matthew Radcliff

Music: “Life Cycles” by Theo Golding [PRS]

For more information: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/eye-popping-view-of-co2-critical-step-for-carbon-cycle-science

This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12445

If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/NASAExplorer

Or subscribe to NASA’s Goddard Shorts HD Podcast: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f0004_index.html

Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
· Facebook: http://www. FACEBOOK /NASA.GSFC
· Twitter twitter: #NASAGoddard
· Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/
· Instagram http://www. INSTAGRAM /nasagoddard/
· Google+ http://plus.google.com/+NASAGoddard/posts
Video Rating: / 5

20 thoughts on “Following Carbon Dioxide Through the Atmosphere”

  1. NASA continues to play politics instead of science. Their game is based on 3 layers of lies.

    Lie #1: Global Warming is dangerous. — We live in an Ice Age, damn it. Our Holocene interglacial has already shown signs of shutting down starting 3,000 years ago. The pattern is very similar to that at the end of the Eemian, before Earth experienced 90,000 years without summers. Earth has spent far more time outside of Ice Ages than in them. The average temperature of Earth for the time life has been on land was something like 7C to 10C warmer than today — and life thrived! According to some scientists, the Eemian was as much as 5C warmer than today (still in our ongoing Ice Age) and life did just fine.

    Lie #2: CO2 contributes a significant portion to the warming. — Climate changes in cycles. Our Modern Warm Period is one of 10 natural warm periods of the Holocene, based on a 1,000-year cycle. Before the Modern, we had the Medieval, the Roman and the Minoan warm periods. Our Modern Warm Period is the coldest of the Holocene's 10 warm periods. The Medieval Warm Period was the 2nd coldest, yet the Vikings could grow crops in Greenland and the Brits could grow wine grapes in Northern England; today it's too damned cold to do those things. The fact that the Modern Warm Period was going to happen with or without humans tells us that the warming was not out of the ordinary. The fact that the Modern was the weakest warm period of the Holocene tells us that the human contribution to warming from CO2 is vanishingly small. (Ref: Greenland ice core temperature proxies, Dr. Ole Humlum, Oslo U).

    Lie #3: CO2 levels are dangerously high. — Quite the opposite. Everything below 1,000 ppm is dangerously low — Starvation Levels! In fact, when CO2 dropped to 800 ppm during the Oligocene, plants worldwide freaked out and evolved C4 species to cope with the dangerous starvation levels. Life doesn't evolve in one direction unless the environment compels it to do so. And this concerned multiple species in locations around the globe evolving in parallel to solve the same problem — extremely low CO2 (at 800 ppm)! Average CO2 for the last 600 million years was about 1,600 ppm. When Earth had 8,000 ppm, Earth was a garden paradise. Where else do you think we get fossil fuels — from the lush forests which soaked up all that CO2. Life loves the stuff!

    And NASA should know better. They set the maximum CO2 level on their spacecraft (SMAC) at 20,000 ppm! Nominal for spacecraft and naval submarines is between 5,000 and 10,000 ppm.

    More Lies

    Other lies have spun off from the above.

    One is that the rate of modern warming is dangerous. The rate of +3C warming over a century is truly NOT dangerous when most every life form can withstand daily and yearly changes at far higher rates. A turtle could crawl to cooler climate in a month and rest the remainder of that "dangerous century" the UN and NASA keep talking about.

    Another lie is that the rate of warming is unusual. Ironically, the other major climate cycle (PDO) is a 60-year cycle and it shows virtually the same rate of warming from 1910 to 1940 as we experienced from 1970 to 2000. A far higher rate of warming was experienced in 1817, recovering from the 1816 year without a summer. Life worldwide sighed in relief for that return to warmth. At the end of the Younger Dryas, global warming occurred at a rate of something close to +7C in as little as 30 years.

    The Little Ice Age contained far more cold than the cold period between the Medieval and the Roman. And the Medieval-Roman cold period contained far more cold than that experienced between the Roman and the Minoan warm periods. The cooling trend is unmistakable and NASA scientists fudging the data to make it look like it's more warming won't make the trend go away. And life is far, far more difficult during a glacial period of the current Ice Age. Human population during the last glacial period was suppressed to under about 100,000, all because of the lack of rain and food. Animal species were hard hit, too. Meanwhile, NASA, the UN, and other psychopaths want to cool down the planet using Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, "like volcanoes do," (said former CIA Director Brennan; CFR June 2016).

    When NASA posted a page on its website dedicated to "scientific consensus," it lost all respect with me. "Scientific consensus" is an oxymoron — a self-contradictory phrase. And when NASA Goddard's Gavin Schmidt appeared on a talk show, but refused to sit at the table with another climate scientist, NASA Goddard lost even more respect. That other scientist was former NASA award-winning, climate scientist, Dr. Roy Spencer.

    Global Warming is good; we live in an Ice Age. Melt the damned ice and save billions of lives! CO2 is good; we live far closer to CO2 Mass Extinction (150 ppm) than we do to CO2 Normal (1,600 ppm).

    Reply
  2. Why do nasa's own climate charts show the temperature rise before carbon dioxide? Why does the chart show a temperature increase of only 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years?

    Reply
  3. When you say it traps the heat from the sun wouldn't that mean that the sun is the only contributor to global climate change? Since the sun is known to have fluctuations in solar activity are you sure it's not just the sun's fault?

    Reply
  4. Don't plants need carbon dioxide to survive and wouldn't they grow better in a higher concentration of carbon dioxide? What is the right amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

    Reply
  5. good job showing how co2 builds and then disperses as plants pull it in.
    now we know that humans affecting global warning was nothing but fear mongering.

    Reply
  6. In addition methane gas is now at elevated release levels that are alarming scientists esp. Arctic. More dangerous than CO2. Why did the IPCC decide on NonDisclosure of methane problem in 2013? Multi factors with mulit dynamics are causing global temperature/climate imbalance. Including Fukushima radiation such as Krypton 85 changing the electrical balance of upper atsmosphere. UV now extreme in parts of the earth due to thinning of ozone layer by Krypton 85 depleting ozone. sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat

    Reply
  7. I find it strange how most of the gas stays on the northern hemisphere, its extremely mild in the southern hemisphere (where I live)

    Reply
  8. I understand that plant is making a comeback all over the Earth because of the increase from .03 to .04% of CO2 in the atmosphere.
    WOW, if such a small difference can help us grow more food, maybe we should look into other ways to increase CO2 .

    Reply
  9. This is beautiful. Watching all that life giving CO2 is something wonderful to behold. Without CO2 the earth would look like the moon, lifeless and cold. We must nurture and embrace CO2 for it is what has given us all that we know. Celebrate CO2.

    Reply
  10. What a deadly dance… I see all this CO2 all over green regions of Russia and think… "that methane bomb is going off right now…"

    Reply
  11. so in the summer for the land masses above the equator witch is where most of the land mass is. the plant life takes the co2 out of the atmosphere from what you just showed us. so if there was no winter/ice caps the plant life would be active year round and global warming stop increasing? witch is what your model shows it will hit a new balance as the earth warms up.

    Reply
  12. This rendering is disproportionate and thus fraudulent. A flat disk rendering of the Earth has the Antarctic circumventing the entire Earth………which is simply False! When you start with a lie, you end up a slave.

    Reply
  13. Proof that NASA is being run by unethical deceivers and advocates not objective scientists. This video is horribly misleading in that it makes invisible (hides) the majority of CO2 in the atmosphere. So despicable. So harmful for actual science. Shame on you NASA!

    Reply

Leave a Reply to conifergreen2 Cancel reply

5 × 3 =