Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases are gases in the Earth’s atmosphere that trap heat and contribute to the greenhouse effect, leading to global warming and climate change. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is a benchmark indicator of environmental conditions. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane-CH4, nitrous oxide-N2O, halogenated compounds-mainly fluorinated gases) in the atmosphere capture some of the heat from the Sun’s energy that radiates from Earth’s surface, preventing it from escaping back into space. Known as the “greenhouse effect,” this process keeps Earth habitable for life. Human activities have emitted an increasing amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the late 1800s through burning fossil fuels (such as oil, gas, and coal) and, to a lesser extent, through changes in land-use and global deforestation. These recent, rapid changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases at a global scale drive changes that cascade throughout the environment at regional and local scales and are reflected in other climate change indicators considered here. Occurring along with these the long-term global scale human-induced changes in climate are natural patterns of variability that affect temperatures and weather at regional and local scales over the short term. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), with its El Niño and La Niña phases, is a pattern of natural variability that is of particular prominence in the Pacific. The presence of such significant year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability can make it difficult to discern long-term changes in climate due to increasing greenhouse gases.
In this notebook/section we will download the data from the Mauna Loa Station and we will create a time series plot and a table summarizing the evolution of CO2 since 1958