For this second blog, I would like to briefly touch on the discoveries of Charles Keeling and what those discoveries mean to us and the globe in the present. I will also attempt to simply explain the difference between our emissions of CO2 (artificially) and the emission of CO2 in the atmosphere naturally. And finally, I will explain the impact our emissions have on the ecosystem. 

Charles David Keeling was affiliated with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, from 1956 until his death in 2005. His major areas of interest included the geochemistry of carbon and oxygen and other aspects of atmospheric chemistry, with an emphasis on the carbon cycle in nature and the abundance and air sea exchange of carbon dioxide. In 1968, he was appointed professor of oceanography.
Keeling was a world leader in research on the carbon cycle and the increase of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere, known as the greenhouse effect, which may lead to changes in the global climate. He was the first to confirm the accumulation of atmospheric CO₂ by very precise measurements that produced a data set now known widely as the Keeling Curve. Prior to these investigations, it was commonly held that the oceans would readily absorb any excess CO₂ from the atmosphere produced by the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial activities. He also constructed a model of the carbon cycle into which future man-made CO₂ can be introduced to predict concentration levels in the air and water well into the next century.  

Here are a few updated graphs of the Keeling Curve. The first graph is our record of CO2 levels from 800,000 years ago up until now. We know this from ancient air bubbles in ice core samples from the arctic. The second graph is of CO2 levels since 1700.