Environmental Cents: Measuring Temperature, Sea Level, & Carbon Dioxide

By Bruce Saller
WRITER

NASA measures both atmospheric and surface temperatures. Atmospheric temperature is measured by satellites and is used in weather forecasting and global climate analysis. The global surface temperature is derived from measurements from more than 20,000 weather stations, ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures, and temperature measurements from Antarctic research stations.  Global surface temperature is the one we feel, and it has been rising rapidly in recent decades.

This graph shows the change in global surface temperature from 1880-2023, compared to the 1951-1980 average temperature. Earth’s average surface temperature in 2023 was the warmest on record (2.1 degrees F above the 1951-1980 average) since recordkeeping began in 1880. The ten most recent years are the warmest on record and so far, 2024 has been warmer than 2023.

(LOWESS, or Locally Weighted Scatterplot Smoothing, is a tool that creates a smooth line through a plot of random data.)

NASA has measured changes in sea level using tide gauge data beginning in 1900, and satellite data beginning in 1993. This graph shows how much sea level has changed from about 1900-2018, and the close agreement between the tide and satellite data. (Items with pluses (+) are factors that cause global sea level to increase, while minuses (-) are what cause sea level to decrease).

The rate of global sea level rise is accelerating. It has more than doubled from 0.06 inches per year throughout most of the twentieth century to 0.14 inches per year from 2006–2015 and is projected to increase in Norfolk to more than .5 inches per year by 2050.

These rapid increases in temperature and sea level are being caused by a buildup of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The greenhouse gas effect was first discovered in the 1850s. 

We absolutely need some carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere. About seven hundred million years ago, the earth was a snowball without plant or animal life.  Scientists estimate there was less than 200 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

However, if there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the planet will become too hot to support plant and animal life. (An extreme example of this is Venus with an atmosphere of 96 percent CO2 and an average temperature of 867 degrees). We do not know what this upper limit is, but the number of species going extinct each year is accelerating, and one-third of the plant and animal species are projected to go extinct by 2050 if the current increases in greenhouse gas continue.

Scientists have examined ice cores and determined the amount of carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere over the last 800,000 years. These charts show the unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide that is now in our atmosphere (different colored lines represent different source data):

So, we are potentially threatening our species’ existence if we allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue rising. Please do what you can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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