Weather in your inbox

Forecast Location

Sign Up

By signing up you agree to the Terms & Privacy Policy. Unsubscribe at any time.

Were the tweets about climate change made by the Badlands National Park's official Twitter account scientifically accurate?

The Badlands National Park's official Twitter account (@BadlandsNPS) appeared to go rogue on Tuesday afternoon, tweeting four tweets with statements about climate change that were deleted hours later. According to a report by BuzzFeed's Claudia Koerner, a National Parks official said that the tweets were published by a former employee and were taken down because the account had been "compromised." The response by the former employee appeared to be triggered by reports that several executive branch agencies were given orders to cease publishing news releases including social media updates. Last week, the U.S. Department of Interior was ordered to suspend its official Twitter accounts after the National Park Service retweeted a couple of posts that compared inauguration crowd sizes.

Weather.com reached out to several climate change experts to weigh in on the veracity of the tweets that were deleted.

"Yes, these are all accurate," Gavin Schmidt, NASA's chief climate scientist, told weather.com in an email. 

"Original data for [the tweet about pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide] comes from Law Dome ice core (Etheridge et al, 1998), for [the tweet about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere] comes from Luthi et al (2008). Note that the 650,000 (figure) could be extend to 800,000 years, and maybe even to 3 million."

"I can say the first 3 statements are common knowledge in climate science," atmospheric scientist Aiguo Dai of the University at Albany, State University of New York, told weather.com in an email. "You can cite the IPCC (2013) report, which cites thousands of research articles."

(MORE: Global Warming: The Weather Channel Position Statement)

Here is a closer look at the the specific statements made in the tweets sent out by the rogue Badlands National Park Twitter account:

Tweet #1: "The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm."

Scott Denning, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Colorado State University, reviewed the statement and confirmed the numbers to weather.com in an email. 

"The numbers are indeed correct," Denning said. "The pre-industrial measurements are from thousands of actual samples of old air preserved as bubbles in ice and snow, analyzed on modern lab bench instruments," Denning added. The modern measurements are made all over the world using a network of hundreds of flask sampling stations, instruments on towers and aircraft, and satellites."

"It doesn’t really make sense to give such a precise number as 404.93 ppm because CO2 varies both in time and in space, but within a few ppm that value is certainly appropriate for present-day," Ted Shepherd, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, told weather.com in an email. "See the Mauna Loa record."

Tweet #2: "Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years"

Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb reviewed the tweet and confirmed the statistics mentioned. "Yes, this is true," Cobb told weather.com in an email.

"We know this from ice core air bubbles that contain samples of ancient atmospheres," she said. "These records end ~800,000 yrs ago. But the highest values peak at ~300ppm over this documented period, to be contrasted with annual average values over 400ppm today. It’s rising 2-3ppm per year these days."

Cobb also included a graph that displayed the ice-core records of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that confirmed the statement.

Tweet #3: "Flipside of the atmosphere; ocean acidity has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution. "Ocean Acidification" #climate #carboncycle."

"This is correct if you take 'ocean acidity' to mean 'the concentration of hydrogen ions in the oceans,' Ken Caldeira, climate scientist at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution told weather.com in an email. "There are various definitions of acidity. Under some of these definitions, pH is a measure of acidity. More specifically, pH is a measure of the concentration (or, more precisely, activity) of hydrogen ions in the water."

"The concentrations of hydrogen ions in the ocean has gone up by about 30 percent since the onset of the industrial revolution," he added.

He observed that the number first appeared in an article in The New Yorker written by Elizabeth Kolbert in 2006.

"I spent time with the fact checkers for The New Yorker at that time going over these numbers and this use of language," Caldeira noted.

In the report, Kolbert had written:

"Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH, like the Richter scale, is a logarithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty percent."

Tweet #4: "Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere."

"This one is easy to do as a high school chemistry problem," Denning explained. "Given the weight of a gallon of gasoline, calculate the mass of carbon in it. Combine each carbon with two oxygen atoms to make a molecule of CO2. Carbon weighs 12 grams per mole and oxygen weighs 16 grams per mole. There are 454 grams in a pound. No problem for the average 17-year old!"

"This is just mass balance," Schmidt added, linking to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report which said, "About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol."

Perry Lindstrom, a greenhouse gas emissions analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, confirmed these stats to weather.com in an email.

"There used to be a bit more in the way of Btu per gallon so it was closer to 20 pounds of CO2 a few years back," Lindstrom said. "I also convert back to carbon weight as sometimes people get confused by the CO2 weighing so much more than a gallon of gasoline itself."

He also sent weather.com the mathematical formula his agency had used to determine the conversion rate.