[Theme music plays]
(Glen Paul) G’day and welcome to CSIROvod, I’m Glen Paul.
Climate change is a serious threat to the planet
and greenhouse gas concentrations are believed to be a major contributor.
In this vod cast we’re going to meet scientists
working at measuring greenhouse gas concentrations over time,
and the finding that they’ve been rising, rapidly,
over the past two centuries,
in other words, since the time of the Industrial Revolution.
It was at that time we begun to burn large amounts of coal
to power our steam engines for industry and to generate electricity.
And while the technology has greatly improved,
we’re still using fossil fuel
in quantities thousands of times more than we did in the 1800s.
The fossil fuels we burn contribute to high concentrations of carbon dioxide,
methane and nitrous oxide
and the research clearly shows how the atmosphere was
at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and how it is now.
(Dr Etheridge) Here we have a picture of
nitrous oxide concentrations
increasing in the atmosphere over the last few decades.
These are from measurements
of air from the Cape Grim Station in Tasmania.
What we want to do and what we have done here is to show
how that change in the recent decades
compares to the long term changes in the atmosphere.
(Glen Paul) And that can be achieved by extracting air
from polar ice sheets that’s been trapped
through snow fall and sealed over thousands of years.
(Dr Etheridge) This is a sample from Lor Dome,
this is some 200 metres down,
it’s a section of the core.
That represents around about one year of snowfall.
And within the snow that fell,
bubbles of air, which are formed and sealed within that ice.
There’s a relatively large amount of air in there,
around about 100 millimetres for a kilogram of ice
and we extract that in this laboratory
and measure it for its various components.
And that includes the greenhouse gases,
the ozone depleting gases
and the isotopes of those gases, which tells us about the sources.
(Glen Paul) One tale that’s often perpetuated
is that natural events like volcanoes are responsible
for the rise in atmospheric CO2. This is simply not true.
(Dr Fraser) We’ve looked in volcanoes and they don’t produce much CO2.
They do produce a lot of gases, but not a lot of CO2.
And there’s a classic example.
There was a major volcano in South America last year,
massive eruption, significant matter omitted to the atmosphere,
we looked for the CO2 trace
in our records at Cape Grim and found absolutely nothing.
It didn’t perturb
the long term trend in CO2 that we’re seeing at all.
So it’s,
they’re important events,
but they’re not large on the scale of the
omissions of fossil fuel, CO2, to the atmosphere.
(Glen Paul) With misinformation doing the rounds
atmospheric scientists are very keen
to ensure people have access to factual greenhouse gas information.
(Dr Fraser) So we decided to make an open website
that the public could go to
and they could look at the greenhouse gas data
and they didn’t even have to ask a scientist to do that.
Now, that’s great for people who, students,
or people who want to use greenhouse gas data.
But it’s also really good for those people who might,
in their mind, be somewhat suspicious of the science,
and they would rather access the data without going through a scientists’,
so that they could look at it by themselves and make their own
conclusions about the data.
So wanted availability
and we wanted transparency in the data
and that’s what we think we do with the website.
(Glen Paul) To understand how these atmospheric changes
might impact Australia’s natural and managed systems,
the Australian Government is supporting
a broad range of climate change science research activities.
(Paul Holper) The Australian Climate Change Science Program
is supplying a lot of information about how
Australia and the world are changing.
So we’re looking at past changes.
We’re looking at what’s happening today
and we’re also working through
how Australia’s climate is likely to change in decades ahead.
We have scientists who study the oceans,
the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
We have scientists who develop and apply
really sophisticated models of behaviour of the climate
to better understand the changes
and to look to the future,
to establish what the changes are likely to be.
(Glen Paul) With such a huge demand for climate change information,
Australian Scientists are working on delivering
the most detailed national climate change projections ever produced.
(Dr Whetton) There are many people that
want climate projection information.
It ranges from the general public,
policy makers in Government,
but also more technical applications
in this industry and Government agencies.
Managing things such as natural ecosystems,
water resources, agricultural production,
those three are probably three of the most important areas
for where climate change will have a significant impact.
(Glen Paul) And impact it will.
Climate change is most certainly being driven by
increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
brought on by human activities.
(Dr Etheridge) The question as to whether this is just a natural cycle
in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, well it’s not.
If we look at thousands of years we don’t see
concentrations anything like we have at the moment.
(Dr Fraser) The fundamental driver of the increase in carbon dioxide
is the burning of fossil fuels.