Allegedly Misleading NASA CO2 concentration video

Anyone else see how this video is misleading?

I suspect Australia would be putting off more Co2 than pictured. As well with South Africa.

I guess we went from looking at CO2 to CO and then back to CO2 somewhere, not exactly sure what that was about.

Ooh, ooh, I know this one, pick me, pick me! I know exactly what your problem is with the video. It's in the bottom right corner. The scale of CO2 goes from 377 to 395 ppmv. In other words, there's actually very little difference between the low end of the spectrum and the high end. Although that in itself can be somewhat misleading. While the difference between the low and the high may seem very small, you also have to keep in mind that really when you scale it up to the scale of the planet, what may seem like very small changes can have very large impacts. Overall, our minds just aren't well-equipped to even process numbers on that kind of scale. Either way, it's hard to bring it down to something relatable.

Technician said:

I suspect Australia would be putting off more Co2 than pictured. As well with South Africa.

Not in comparison with the amount of industry in the northern hemisphere.

I love how the co2 concentration visibly pulses in the amazon and indonesia. Rain forest power, go captain planet!

Quast said:

Not in comparison with the amount of industry in the northern hemisphere.

I assume they don't burn as much coal as China or America.

I love how the co2 concentration visibly pulses in the amazon

It's probably all the bovine flatulence.

Hellbent said:

Anyone else see how this video is misleading?

Nope. Care to comment?

Quast said:

I love how the co2 concentration visibly pulses in the amazon and indonesia. Rain forest power, go captain planet!

I suppose that'll be the day/night cycle. There's also seasonal variations, when wildfires and slash'n'burn clearing for agriculture drive emission levels well up the scale.

geekmarine said:

Ooh, ooh, I know this one, pick me, pick me! I know exactly what your problem is with the video. It's in the bottom right corner. The scale of CO2 goes from 377 to 395 ppmv. In other words, there's actually very little difference between the low end of the spectrum and the high end. Although that in itself can be somewhat misleading. While the difference between the low and the high may seem very small, you also have to keep in mind that really when you scale it up to the scale of the planet, what may seem like very small changes can have very large impacts. Overall, our minds just aren't well-equipped to even process numbers on that kind of scale. Either way, it's hard to bring it down to something relatable.

Thank you Geekmarine. You got it exactly right.

In other words, it's not actually misleading. You just need to know what the values mean, but manipulative labeling makes for better thread titlesheadlines.

I mean, in comparison, for example, the average concentration for CO2 in 1960 was somewhere around 300 ppm whereas today it's closer to 400 ppm. And before the industrial revolution, it was around 280 ppm... It's still a drastic change, though I would agree it's kind of unfair to attempt to show change over such a short span of time, because the fluctuations are minor compared to the larger fluctuations which have happened over recent decades.

I'm sorry to go on like this, but following the whole global warming thing is kind of a hobby of mine. But yeah... the biggest issue I've seen in the whole business has always been that in seemingly every aspect, we're talking in terms that the average person has a hard time processing. What do those changes in ppm mean? How do you understand changes over decades when day-to-day changes seem so minimal? And even when there is a large shift over decades, it's not readily apparent on any given day that a change has taken place.

To me, it's always seemed like trying to explain global warming in terms people can understand and relate to is like trying to explain a tesseract (4-dimensional hypercube). Mathematically, we can easily describe what it is, but it's just not something that easily translates to human perception.