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CO2 Levels Reach 400ppm at Mauna Loa For First Time On Record
Titus Andronicus writes "Today, NOAA reported, 'On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since measurements began in 1958.' For comparison, over the last 800,000 years, CO2 has ranged from roughly 180 ppm to 280 ppm. 'For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.' The last time Earth had 400 ppm was probably more than 3 megayears ago."
i hope there's a special place in hell for people who spent the 70's til present denying climate change - you know who you are. Unfortunately it will be the same place in hell as everyone else when it gets too hot around here.
Kinda, so is it 3,145,728 years, 3,000,000 years, or the bastard 3,072,000?
Which contributes more to global warming, Memory or Storage?
wtf is a megayear? I only know gigadays.
This is /., so mission accomplished.
sheesh. 640 kilayears should be enough for anybody
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
or you could just strap a fern to your face
I don't particularly care what her name is, just get her over here!
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Stupid idiot. Ice is made of frozen water not air! Duh! How do you even freeze air? Yeah, right, we've got massive glaciers of frozen air. How do the penguins walk on all that frozen air?
I just figured I'd answer for him.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind. The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't. Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
;)
I was once at a climate conference on sequestration, where a nuclear physicist on a panel begin talking about how difficult separating CO2 from the air actually is. "Magnetic separation requires a huge apparatus due to CO2's non-polarity. Centrifugal separation requires massive amounts of energy. This problem, I can tell you as a long-time experimental physicist, is tougher than it looks."
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
He got a standing ovation
"A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature."
Riiight, yes global warming is a hoax because Bill O'Reilly's toes were cold this Christmas season.
wtf is a megayear? I only know gigadays.
It's just marketing fraud by geologists to make the time span seem longer, 3 mega-years is only 2.86 mebi-years.
mya