English Essay

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Rise and fall and sea level and the Jersey shore First Exercise The purpose of this exercise is to familiarize you with scientific units and give you a feeling for how humans are changing the carbon budget. Units: When Yao Ming signed in the NBA his combination of size and skills people referred to him as being "1 in a million." The joke in China, where there are over 1 billion people, was that there would be 1000 more just like him. You all understand percent (1%) which is parts per hundred. We will be talking about parts per million (ppm). 1% = 1 x 10-2 = 10,000 ppm Pre-anthropogenic (1850 AD) concentration means CO2 levels in the atmosphere before humans started to burn coal, peat, oil, and gas in vast quantities. In 1850, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere at the rate of approximately 2 ppm/yr due to human interaction. In 2013 AD, CO2 in the atmosphere is 396 ppm. 1. What was the percent of atmospheric CO2 in 1850? Move the decimal place 4 digits to the left to get percent (%) 2. Hopefully you will live until the end of this century - 2100; what will be the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2100 assuming there is no change in the emissions rate of 2 ppm/year? 3. What is potentially wrong with the answer you selected above, our prediction for the future based on current CO2 emissions? 4. What is the percent of CO2 in the atmosphere that humans are emitting per year relative to preanthropogenic levels? (Hint: divide the rate of increase (2 ppm/year) by the amount of CO2 in 1850. and multiply by 100). 5. There were 600 gigatons (106 tons) of carbon in the atmosphere in 1850. How many gigatons accumulated in the atmosphere each year due to human activity? (Hint: take the percent we are emitting each year and multiply it by 600; remember 1% = 0.01) 6. Humans are emitting 7.7 gigatons (Gt) of fossil fuel each

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