For much of history, Potosnak says, levels of CO2 in the air have risen and fallen naturally. There has been a relative balance between the sources that spewed it and the processes that removed it. But things have changed. Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, releases lots of CO2. Those fuels power our cars, electronics and more. “Now,” Potosnak says, “we’re amping up that natural [CO2 release] process so fast that it’s throwing our systems out of whack.”
Increases in CO2 levels that “should take thousands of years,” he says, are developing within decades. That’s shown by the dramatic and seemingly skyrocketing “Keeling curve.” This graph of CO2 levels shows them climbing steadily over the past several decades. (The curve gets its name from scientist Charles David Keeling, who collected a lot of the early data.)
Indeed, from 1990 through 2021, “the warming effect on our climate … by long-lived greenhouse gases rose by nearly 50 percent, with CO2 accounting for about 80 percent of this increase.” The World Meteorological Organization, part of the United Nations, issued those findings on October 26, 2022. A year earlier, it pointed out, CO2 concentrations had reached 415.7 parts per million in air. That’s 49 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, when use of fossil fuels started to really take off.
It’s now known that humanity’s use of fossil fuels has changed the balance of our ecosystems. That’s causing “a whole cascade of problems,” says Potosnak. “What should take thousands of years, we’re doing within decades by burning so much fossil fuels.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-carbon-dioxide-source-chemistry-greenhouse-gas-climate#:~:text=CO2%20is%20called%20a%20trace%
