"We are a Force Bigger Than Geological Proportions" - Raymond Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago talk)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkUA98XSrTo

This is the same talk he gave in Sweden where you can see the slides!

 "Compared to geology, We are so big, in our imprint on the Earth, it makes geology look unimportant..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2NvRlxGwQ4 

 12 gigatons for 200 years is the natural carbon cycle. We are doing 1000 to 5000 gigatons per 200 years. The 1000 is where we will go if we really very aggressively... if all the world does what Sweden has done with its carbon outputs, we may stop fossil fuels when we hit total emissions of 1000 gigatons."

https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/papers/PhysTodayRT2011.pdf

600 gigatons was the average natural carbon levels in the atmosphere on the preindustrial level.

Now we have 1.5 gigatons created just in the U.S. a year - the reason we can change the atmosphere is because there was not a lot of carbon in the atmosphere to begin with. 

cumulative carbon emissions have been going up exponentially globally. We've already put up 700 gigatons (as of five years ago) but a lot of has gone into oceans and plants....

Let’s do the thought experiment of building a solar array to generate the entire world’s present electricity consumption, and see what the extra absorption of sunlight by the array does to climate.

the answer is two trillion Watts, in round numbers. How much area of solar cells do you need to generate this? On average, about 200 Watts falls on each square meter of Earth’s surface, but you might preferentially put your cells in sunnier, clearer places, so let’s call it 250 Watts per square meter. With a 15% efficiency, which is middling for present technology the area you need is

2 trillion Watts/(.15 X 250. Watts per square meter)

or 53,333 square kilometers. That’s a square 231 kilometers on a side, or about the size of a single cell of a typical general circulation model grid box. If we put it on the globe, it looks like this:

 

 For our 16.83 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity produced each year, we then would emit 4.2 trillion kilograms of carbon, i.e. 4.2 gigatonnes each year. Unlike energy, carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, and builds up year after year. It is only slowly removed by absorption into the ocean, over hundreds to thousands of years. After a hundred years, 420 gigatonnes will have been emitted, and if half that remains in the atmosphere (remember, rough estimates suffice to make the point here) the atmospheric stock of CO2 carbon will increase by 210 gigatonnes, or 30% of the pre-industrial atmospheric stock of about 700 gigatonnes of carbon.

 https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/

it's a property from quantum theory that that whole Kirchhoff's law that anything that absorbs photons also emits them and so

what what carbon dioxide does is it kind of intercepts the hot photons coming up

from the ground and it replaces them from photons radiates at a colder temperature of the upper atmosphere 

in this sense co2 is planetary insulation when you put pink fiberglass

insulation in your house it doesn't actually generate heat but it just reduces the rate at which you lose heat

from the inside to the outside at a given temperature of the inside and now while you're fired fiberglass in solute

insulation reduces this heat flux by reducing the turbulent heat flux rather

than infrared heat flux co2 thermodynamically has the same effect except it's doing it like low emissivity

glass it's doing it by doing it by changing the infrared energy balance and so it means that with the same amount of

energy supplied by the Sun which is our furnace the surface has to get hotter in

order to in order to lose energy at the at the correct rate so it's no different

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggmyAlWB2Y