On burning a certain amount of fuel a total of 500 million tonnes of CO2 is released to the atmosphere. If the entire amount of CO2 remains in the atmosphere, what will be the rise in the concentration of CO2 in ppm?
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Answer:
fact, the last time the atmospheric CO₂ amounts were this high was more than 3 million years ago, when temperature was 2°–3°C (3.6°–5.4°F) higher than during the pre-industrial era, and sea level was 15–25 meters (50–80 feet) higher than today.
Carbon dioxide concentrations are rising mostly because of the fossil fuels that people are burning for energy. Fossil fuels like coal and oil contain carbon that plants pulled out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis over the span of many millions of years; we are returning that carbon to the atmosphere in just a few hundred years. According to State of the Climate in 2019 from NOAA and the American Meteorological Society,
From 1850 to 2018, 440 ± 20 Pg C (1 Pg C = 10¹⁵ g C) were emitted as CO₂ from fossil fuel burning (Friedlingstein et al. 2019). For 2018 alone, global fossil fuel emissions reached 10 ± 0.5 Pg C yr−1 for the first time in history (Friedlingstein et al. 2019). About half of the CO₂ emitted since 1850 remains in the atmosphere. The rest of it has partially dissolved in the world’s oceans… . While the terrestrial biosphere is currently also a sink for fossil fuel CO₂, the cumulative emissions of CO₂ from land use changes such as deforestation cancel terrestrial uptake over the 1850–2018 period (Friedlingstein et al. 2019).
Global atmospheric carbon dioxide was 409.8 ± 0.1 ppm in 2019, a new record high. That is an increase of 2.5 ± 0.1 ppm from 2018, the same as the increase between 2017 and 2018. In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.6 ± 0.1 ppm per year. Between 2009-18, however, the growth rate has been 2.3 ppm per year. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.