Random Earth fact of the day: Did you know that just 35 years ago scientist couldn’t decide whether the earth was heating up or cooling down?

Ok here we go: As you very well know (or as you should know anyway) this is my blog on global warming, dumbed down for the average person. So let’s just go on and get the stupid questions out of the way here shall we.
What is Global warming? Global warming is the increase in the average temperature that has been caused by the presence of certain gases, called greenhouse gases, in earth’s atmosphere (thank you Mr. Tim Flannery. Oh and just to let you in on a little secret, Tim Flannery is the author of a very handy book called We are the Weather Makers. I will be pulling lots of information from this book. It is my environmental bible). All right so the Earth is heating up.
Is this necessarily bad? I mean millions of years ago there were ice ages, that resulted in massive ice bridges that connected continents. Obviously, the earth heated up then or we would not be sitting here right now. So now, you’re thinking well if the earth is heating up now and it’s supposedly our fault then how did it heat up millions of years ago. Well guess what, I am already a step ahead of you. I know the answer (well I’m pretty sure I think I do anyway).
First let me explain CO2. This is, of course, carbon dioxide. A single atom of carbon that has mixed with 2 atoms of oxygen, thus creating an colorless odorless gas. This gas is very important to our atmosphere, it’s kind of like the equivalent of a thermostat, it regulates the amount of heat we have. Even though this is very important, it very much so follows the rule of “a little goes a long way”. CO2 is fewer than 4 in every 10,000 molecules.
Is this clear enough? Or am I losing you here? CO2 (carbon dioxide) is important, but we must have a balance amount. If there is to much we will melt. If there isn’t enough we will turn into people popsicles.
Now that we have established what CO2 is and what it does, Ill attempt to explain how scientist measure it (because we think we have to know and understand everything). Scientist measure the CO2 levels by coring out bit of glaciers and ancient rocks and test tiny pockets of air, thus finding out what kind of air the earth had a really really long time ago. Now once they have these tiny air bubble tests, they are measured by gigatons (which is a billion tons) of carbon weight.
During the coldest time on earth CO2 levels were somewhere around 160 parts per million with a carbon weight of 588 gigatons (which is a billion tons, don’t forget this. That is a lot of tons after all). One of the latest test shows the earth now has CO2 levels of 387 parts per million with a carbon weight of 813 gigatons.
A gigatons seems like a huge number doesn’t it? But then again if you stop to think how big the earth really is I suppose it really isn’t quite that much because broken down simply we have gained about 225 gigatons of carbon weight.
I hope this makes at least a little bit of sense, I sort of confuse myself too sometimes when I talk. I’ll stop here today and let you chew on this for a while. This will all come together and make sense soon, I promise, just take it one-step at a time. In my next post it talk about how this effects the ice ages (how exciting). Until then continue to consider the trees in all you do.