UQx DENIAL101x 3.2.3.1 Taking up residence
Channel: UQx Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Date: 2015-05-12

Gavin Cawley explains the carbon cycle, how human activity is causing an increase of CO2 in our atmosphere, and uses bank accounts to show how we can know humans are increasing atmospheric CO2 even if we don't know every natural carbon source and sink. Subtitles available in ENGLISH and SLOVENIAN.

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Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial in Denial101x, a massive open online course (MOOC) from UQx and edX. Denial101x isn’t just a MOOC about climate change; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change.

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References for this video:

Gavin C. Cawley, On the atmospheric residence time of anthropogenically sourced carbon dioxide, Energy & Fuels, volume 25, number 11, pages 5503–5513, September 2011.  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef200914u

Houghton, J. T., Jenkins, G. J., Ephramus, J. J., Eds. Climate Change - The IPCC Scientific Assessment; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K., 1990 https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_report.pdf  Section 1.2, particularly subsection 1.2.1 “The Cycle of Carbon in Nature” on page 14 (page 56 of the pdf), which explicitly cautions against confusing the residence (turnover) time with the adjustment time. 

Craig, H. (2011). The Natural Distribution of Radiocarbon and the Exchange Time of Carbon Dioxide Between Atmosphere and Sea. Tellus A, 9(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/tellusa.v9i1.9078

Archer, D. and V. Brovkin, 2008: The millennial atmospheric lifetime of anthropogenic CO2. Clim. Change, 90, 283–297. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-008-9413-1

Eby, M., K. Zickfeld, A. Montenegro, D. Archer, K. J. Meissner, and A. J. Weaver, 2009: Lifetime of anthropogenic climate change: Millennial time scales of potential CO2 and surface temperature perturbations. J. Clim., 22, 2501–2511. https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/eby.2009.long_tail.pdf