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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."
Dupe.
hawaii gets all the air blowing across the pacific, so it can be considered a better baseline than doing it in a city where local emissions may influence. I don't see how the size of the cone or islands makes any difference. it's just a weather station on top of the mountain. And no, all the other islands were formed by their own volcanoes so stfu or are you a plate tectonic denier as well?
> So this seems like a silly place to consider as a steady-state CO standard.
If you lived on the volcano, you'd know better. Wind direction is very consistent and it is precisely because the volcano is so large that contamination is rare - it only comes out of the vents and those are few and far between.
How do scientists know that Mauna Loa's volcanic emissions don't affect the carbon dioxide data collected there?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Megayear is actually very common in science circles when talking about time spans where using millions of years makes sense. It's usually written "Ma" or "mya".
c++;
Fortunately for science the Mauna Loa readings are in good agreement with those taken at hundreds of other sites around the globe.
Here's a great animation from NOAA showing global CO2 distribution and putting recent changes in the context of the last million years or so. It takes a few minutes to watch, but it's worth seeing to the end, in my opinion.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html
actually, for 95% of the population 32 kilodays is sufficient :(
A very high CO2 measurement is found after a decade of reduction in overall temperature.
Where did you get that "fact"? The last decade had the highest average global temperatures on record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2012.svg
If you can't even get a simple quantitative *fact* like that right, why would anyone listen to any of your *opinions*?
And if you actually RTFA it's not about just the last decade, they have over 50 years of data showing a rise in both CO2 and ave global temperature.
The relationship between CO2 content in the atmosphere, and how much heat the Earth absorbs from / radiates into space, is basic physics, and has been well understood for a hundred years or so. Increasing CO2 from 280ppm to 400ppm will cause a significant heating of the atmosphere and oceans. Dismissing it because it's only 0.00012 is vacuous handwaving.