About a million years ago, around the time of the ice age, CO2 concentrations were approximately 160 ppm.  This increased as the human population began to grow and was up to about 280 ppm just before the Industrial Revolution.  The current concentration is about 380 ppm, representing 869 gigatons of carbon dioxide in our air.  This represents an increase of 100 ppm in the last 150 years or so when in the million years before that there was only an increase of 80 ppm.  The results of this rapid increase can be catastrophic, from global warming to increasingly violent weather.

Graphical results of CO2 concentration measurements that have been taken from the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano show this disturbing trend.

The blue and red oscillations represent the natural rise and fall of CO2 in the atmosphere.  In the winter, people burn more coal and oil to stay warm and CO2 goes up.  In the summer, less fossil fuel is burned and leaves return to the trees and CO2 drops. 

Using this data, it is possible to extrapolate a function to model the increase of CO2 in our air.  For this excercise, it is useful to simplify the model down to the concentration graph below.

Using this given data, the author of the blog post that is linked at the bottom of this article was able to interpolate a function that closely resembles this data.  The function he came up with is shown below. (blue is the actual data and red is the interpolated function). 

 Satisfied that the interpolated function does, in fact, closely model the actual given data, the author then extrapolated this model to determine the effects we are having on CO2 concentrations in a 100 year period.  The author chose the period from 1935 to 2035, extrapolating his model both into the future and the past.  This extrapolated model looks something like this.

So, according to this model, the human race will have been able to raise the CO2 concentration levels about 50% in 100 years.  This is a very scary and dangerous trend.  Even more so when considering this model will probably underestimate the CO2 increase.  This model assumes that current trends in the increased CO2 production remain the same.  However, with China, India, and many other countries competing to “catch up with the West”, CO2 production will probably increase even more than expected, creating a need for immediate action to slow this trend.

http://www.squarecirclez.com/blog/earth-killer-composite-trigonometry-co2-graph/978