CO2, approx 5 x 8 x 30"
Embroidery on silk

800,000 years of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is embroidered on silk and emerges from an oil can.

The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has increased sharply in the past 100 years as measured from the ground and from satellites. Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, this increase has warmed the planet. Greenhouse gases trap the heat from sunlight. Without any greenhouse gases, Earth would be too cold to support life. But the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet becomes. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives.

When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. (Hold your hand over a dark rock on a warm sunny day and you can feel this phenomenon for yourself.) These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect.’ See How Exactly Does Carbon Dioxide Cause Global Warming? for a molecular level explanation.

Emissions of human-caused (anthropogenic) greenhouse gases come primarily from burning fossil fuels: coal, hydrocarbon gas liquids, natural gas and petroleum. Scientists measure the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere using satellites and other instruments, collecting samples of air from specific places. The levels of greenhouse gases that existed in the past are found in ancient air bubbles trapped deep in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica. The recent record is observations from Mauna Loa Observatory. For more info about CO2, look at NASA and CO2Earth.

Other oil can graphs are here.

CO2 started out in a 9x 9x3" wooden box for a Textile Study Group of NY show.