How Can we Separate Man Made Greenhouse Gases from Those Naturally Occurring?

A research team has developed a new monitoring system to analyze and compare emissions from man-made fossil fuels and trace gases in the atmosphere, a technique that likely could be used to monitor the effectiveness of measures regulating greenhouse gases. The University of Colorado Boulder-led team looked at atmospheric gas measurements taken every two weeks from aircraft over a six-year period over the northeast United States to collect samples of CO₂ and other environmentally important gases.Their method allowed them to separate CO₂ derived from fossil fuels from CO₂ being emitted by biological sources like plant respiration, said CU-Boulder Senior Research Associate Scott Lehman, who led the study with CU-Boulder Research Associate John Miller.The separation was made possible by the fact that CO₂ released from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas has no carbon-14, since the half-life of that carbon radio isotope is about 5,700 years - far less than the age of fossil fuels, which are millions of years old.