1 — The Earth is 510 million square kilometers or 197 million square miles. It has 7 continents, 5 oceans, 4 seasons, 2 hemispheres, 2 frozen poles, 1 hot equator, day and night.
This makes taking it’s temperature an interesting job. You don’t do it by going outside your house and recording the temperature every morning. It’s also not good enough to just look at the hottest day ever recorded and compare every other recording to that temperature. It is most definitely not useful to go outside and see if you can make a snowball during winter after a snowstorm.
Lets’s say that Sen. James Inhofe’s snowball shown above is 4” in diameter. It would take roughly 15.76 quadrillion snowballs to equal the surface area of the Earth. That’s 15,760,000,000,000,000 snowballs, roughly.
Here’s how we really take the Earth’s temperature...
Scientists use 4 sets of temperature measurements or datasets.
- The UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit jointly produce HadCRUT4.
- The US GISTEMP series comes via the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS).
- The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) creates the MLOST record.
- The Japan Meteorological Agency ( JMA).
Temperature measurements today represent as complete a global temperature as possible, nearly 99% coverage. They include measurements from the air above land and the ocean surface collected by ships, buoys, and satellites. Recorded observations began in 1880. Temperatures are compared daily to a long term average to evaluate changes over time. It’s a complex and serious effort to understand the planet we live on.
These are really just sources:
Explainer: How do scientists measure global temperature?
Climate Change: Global Temperature
SURFACE AREA OF THE EARTH
Calculate volume of a sphere and its surface area
2 — Carbon emissions before the industrial revolution were relatively balanced with nature. Why? Because humans weren’t burning fossil fuels for energy. When we did, the emissions increased because fossil fuels are the remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. And life on Earth is carbon based. So burning fossil fuels emits...carbon. In the mid 1700’s, the global CO2 emissions are estimated to be about 3 to 7 million tonnes per year. CO2 emissions kept increasing and by 1850 were about 54 million tonnes per year. Since then they have increased year after year, almost every year, and by a lot. Although there’s some optimism that the trend is changing, today’s global CO2 emissions are estimated to be 32.1 to 35.7 gigatonnes.
A gigatonne is 1 billion metric tonnes. 1 metric ton is about 2,200 lbs.
That works out to about 16 billion small elephants or 273 trillion Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s every year.
Check out these links for more information:
Why didn't we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution?
Global emissions to fall for first time during a period of economic growth
Decoupling of global emissions and economic growth confirmed
How to Measure Atmospheric CO2 in Gigatons & Cubic Kilometers
3 — You probably know that trees breathe CO2. They photosynthesize carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make carbohydrates. But did you know that trees are 50% carbon? That’s why scientists call trees and forests carbon sinks. Scientists say forests hold 45% of land carbon.
Trees can absorb almost 50 lbs of carbon every year. A 40 year old tree can be 2 tons or more. That’s 1 ton of carbon taken out of the atmosphere and stored for the life of the tree or almost 12 Chef Ramsay’s!
More reading?
Ever wondered how much carbon is stored in a tree?
Tree Facts
Seeing Forests for the Trees and the Carbon: Mapping the World’s Forests in Three Dimensions
4 — From A.D. 800 to the mid 19th century, world population quintupled to around a billion. In the 1900’s it doubled almost 3 times to 7.4 billion today. Feeding all of us has taken it’s toll on the Earth. We have dramatically changed the landscape it order to grow crops, build homes and cities, dams and mining. The World Resource Institute reports that more than 80% of Earth’s natural forests have been destroyed. Deforestation was at it’s peak in the 1990’s when the Earth lost 16 million hectares a year, or roughly the size of the state of Michigan.
The good news is that trees are a renewable resource meaning, if you plant them, they grow back. Even though it still ended up a loss overall, from 1990 to 2010, the US added 7.7 million hectares of trees. That comes out to roughly 33 billion twister mats.
There’s More to Read:
9% of Today's Warming Caused By Preindustrial People
National Geographic: Eye in the Sky--Deforestation
World Forest Area Still on the Decline
Green Facts: Forests
5 — It’s true that our climate is always changing and it’s also true that CO2 levels have been very high in different prehistoric times. What is overlooked (deliberately or not) when making this argument is the rate at which the change is currently happening. For the last 650,000 years. the concentration of CO2 had never been more than 280 ppm (parts per million). It’s now reached 400 ppm and increased 30 ppm from 1987-2007.
120 years ago the dead guy shown below used knowledge he obtained from previous dead guys about greenhouse gases and surface temperature and calculating things to calculate that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase surface temperature by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius.
Now, 5 or 6 C doesn’t sound that bad but it is a dramatic increase. Parts of the planet would actually become uninhabitable for parts of the day. In the areas hit by this worst case scenario, healthy adults would find it difficult to work outside for any lengthy amount of time. Heat waves are already deadly and kill more people than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. At current levels, more than 600 cities could become ineligible to host the Summer Olympics within the century.
Here, read these:
History of climate change science
Atmospheric CO2 reaches 400 ppm Feb 2015 highest in 20 million years
What are the greenhouse gas changes since the Industrial Revolution?
Thermogeddon: When the Earth gets too hot for humans
The countries that will be so hot by 2100 humans won’t be able to go outside
When Will It Get Too Hot to Hold the Summer Olympics?