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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."
Megayears? Someone trying to sound smarter than they are?
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?
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.
I think you'll find it to be much easier and just as effective to get people to stop breeding.
Stop breathing. It is the only way to keep the CO2 from rising...
You first. And keep on holding it. When your vision starts to go and you feel like you are about to pass out, that means it's working. If you want to ensure you stop breathing, might I suggest you tie yourself to the bottom of the deep end of the nearest pool.
In the mean time, I'll concentrate on keeping the carbon that has been safely stored in the ground for millions of years, in the ground... instead of wasting my time with silly, not well thought out rebuttals that focus on carbon that is already active in the environment and merely cycled when we breath, grow plants and eat them.
This is /., so mission accomplished.
The 800,000 year level comes from testing of air pockets locked in glacial ice. Seriously, is it that hard to try and understand something before speaking stupid things? Jesus, you climate change deniers cannot even grasp the simplest concept of science.
You: 800,000 years that's so long ago where'd you get that "fact" right there?
Scientist: Pockets of air in glacial ice. You know, core samples and crap?
You: Har har har, ice, right. Come get your 800,000 year old sample from my freezer. High FIVE!
Damn, science isn't a fucking secret you just have to ask how they know stuff instead of saying "I don't get it therefore it isn't."
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
No less an authority than the United Nations pins a full 9% of all human-related CO2 production on cows, but it's worse than that:
Source: Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns
Ken
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
It must interfere with your invincible ignorance field. But do try to keep up Ok?
No, what it proves is that climate forcing due to CO2 is likely non-linear in impact. It also may indicate negative feedback loops responding to the changes. Also, since we're not measuring a closed system there are a huge number of possible things causing the current climate response.
This shit is really really really complicated. About the only thing I'm certain of is that all our models for climate so far are not good enough.
Actually this is a follow-up :
2013-05-05 : "individual observations [...] have exceeded 400 parts per million" "The daily average observation has crept above 399 ppm" "the daily observation will break the 400 ppm milestone within a few days"
2013-05-09 : "the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide [...] surpassed 400 parts per million"
Of course, Soulskill should have referenced timothy, they were obviously aiming for the dupe, but new data arrived in the meantime.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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.
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.
. It also may indicate negative feedback loops responding to the changes.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter,
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one? Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run? And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)? And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Daily peak is not the same as daily average.
Just so you know: volcanos emit CO2. They're likely the primary source of "natural" CO2 emission long-term (as if mankind was somehow distinct from nature). A station on top of a large and occasionally-active volcano does seem like an odd choice for a baseline, without knowing more about it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> Fortunately for science the Mauna Loa readings are in good agreement with those taken at hundreds of other sites around the globe. Roughly. Each hemisphere has the opposite season fluctuation of about 2%.
Point is -- we need more medical marijuana and industrial hemp to suck up the extra CO2 from the atmosphere. Hemp and algae are the best ways to remove CO2 from the air. And unless you know of someway to get high off algae, I say let's go with reefer.
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.
So glaciers melt - they have melted before and came back in a few million years there is no reason to believe that this will not occur again. So we lose access to them now but this would happen eventually anyway. Sure not in our lifetimes but across the millions or billions of years before the sun kills the planet completely ice will come and go unless we find a way to control the natural process that regulates.
Glaciers melting lead to rising sea levels - well this means a few options accept the loss of land or put up barriers to protect it. You always hear that NYC will be underwater in X number of years. Of course it wont. Humans will find ways to solve that problem. Build dams, raise the island by bringing in extra soil, etc. Now a place like Florida does not have those type of options so likely it will slowly be sunk by hurricanes that destroy the sand barriers that we put up. Yes, entire towns will be destroyed in a storm but this happens today. It will likely be more frequent thus making it more difficult to make the decision to rebuild. Eventually people will move somewhere else. And during this process jobs will be created to rebuild homes, reinforce older homes, build dams, better water management process etc. It is said that global warming will cost X billion or trillion dollars. Well a lot of that will go into job creation oddly enough. "You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life."
We are killing the planet! - Ahh this old argument. There is nothing we can do currently to kill the planet. Nothing. Sure global warming might kill off a chunk of species that cannot adapt. Hell all out nuclear war might kill off 90% of the worlds species but life will survive and adapt. Over a million years or so the radiation will decay and the adaption process will continue. It would be a blip on the radar for the earth, kind of like the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs.
So as I see it global warming is just accelerating a natural process that would happen anyway some time in the future (hundreds, thousands or millions of years). Lots of money will be spent trying to fight or clean up the damage but that just means job creation. Species will adapt or die but over a long enough time period we will die off anyway (baring interstellar travel).
They have multiple stations, including some very close to active volcanic activity for baselines. The core results aren't impacted by the regions volcanic activities.
As for global warming, we aren't going to stop burning the remains of life from the past, so it goes. I don't have a position or a "belief", it seems irrelevant to me given humanity's approach to energy.
BlameBillCosby.com
The annual cycle in CO2 is due to springtime uptake of carbon by plants and autumn release of CO2 as leaves fall and photosynthesis shuts down. The paleoclimatic delay between temperature and CO2 concentrations is characteristic of a positive feedback in the system.
Hello? Seven BILLION people?
And enough livestock to actually feed a good chunk of them?
Hell, the planetary population only two billion in something like 1925?
Yet we've nearly quadrupled population in the last 90 years?
Roughly half of which live in central and eastern Asia? Countries where their pollution output would shame early 20th century industrialists?
Yeah, fossil fuel has a good deal to do with it. But let's not pretend the sheer mass of humanity itself isn't contributing greatly to increased CO2.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...the fact that there are 7 times as many humans on Earth as there was even a couple hundred years ago.
Not saying fossil fuels aren't contributing, but surely the population issue has to be a contributing factor too.
Tsk-tsk-tsk... I smell a "-1 Flamebait" in the making... Sure would've been, if a Conservative chose to be this condescending.
Awesome. More CO2 — combined with the plentiful Hawaiian sun — and more plants are growing. Sounds like a self-regulating system to me...
Ok, so it is still acceptable to breath. Most reassuring. How about passing gas? Cows are getting blamed constantly for doing that — despite their methane being generated just as naturally as the CO2 we exhale...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You do realize that to get people to stop or actually slow down breeding means making their life better while genocide means the opposite? Fact, well off, educated people, especially women with access to effective birth control, breed less which is the reason that every developed country has (ignoring immigration) negative population growth and even the States barely has positive growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The feedback mechanism is known. Temperature goes up, evaporation rate goes up leading to more rainfall which causes more erosion which sequesters more carbon. After a few thousand years this feedback will bring the CO2 level back down.
All we need is some patience and the climate will correct itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
http://www.csrees.usda.gov/funding/nri/highlights/2007_no9.pdf
Cool.
I can't even remember how many angles I have used to try to explain this. Climate-change deniers are completely impossible to convince that the earth is not an infinite system.
This brings to mind my favorite George Orwell quote, from his book, "A Clergyman's Daughter:"
"She came up against it all day long--that vague, blank disbelief so common in illiterate people, against which all argument is powerless."
Sums it up for many contemporary public debates, don't you think?
Interesting, I hadn't thought about soil erosion. What I was thinking about was rock weathering where CO2 is consumed by silicate weathering which results in calcium carbonate. This page shows it pretty well, http://dilu.bol.ucla.edu/home.html. There are vast amounts of carbon sequestered as calcium carbonate, maybe half that has ever been released from the mantle. Wiki mentions that erosion also transports dissolved CO2 to the ocean where various organisms convert it to calcium carbonate, think shells falling to the bottom of the ocean to form limestone.
In geological time frames this has a large impact on global climate. When the continents are in one mass there is little rainfall in the interior and little erosion. Global CO2 levels increase along with temperature. And the opposite also happens, lots of continents, especially with mountain ranges in the right places so lots of rainfall on land causing erosion and CO2 levels go down. This is perhaps the current situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Actually it's not Carbon 14 they're measuring. It's the ratio of Carbon 12 to Carbon 13. Both are stable as compared to the radioactive C14. Fossil fuels have a lower level of C13 than the atmosphere in general because photosynthesis prefers the lighter C12 atom. When we burn fossil fuels it dilutes the C13 in the atmosphere and changes the ratio.
All the worlds plants took a collective sigh of relief. CO2 has been so low for so long, it was like hypoxia for plants.
Probably not that much relief. The optimal level for plants appears to be in the 1,000 to 2,000 ppm range. Thus 400 ppm is "too low" and still close to the 200 ppm lower limit. For animals, including humans, "too high", would appear to be greater than 5,000 ppm.
Yet there are those prediction ecological disaster at more than an order of magnitude lower.
mbeckman: ..."What emboldens warmist scientists and modellers, beyond institutional backing and the advantages of groupthink, is the fact that the atmosphere’s uniform CO2 concentration is easy to work with – both in modelling and conceptually – but they should aquire humility before indulging their CO2 fetish and advancing their tenuous doomsday predictions given geoscience’s overwhelming ignorance about climate feedbacks."
Wow, that post is just so full of derp, that I am at a loss as to where to begin.
Let's see, paragraph 2, "Correlations are observed, but they do not prove causation... That is, "CO2 and climate temperature change show correlations, but not cause and effect."
Wow. OK, so I downloaded and read the linked PDF article. First-off, it is not published in a peer-reviewed journal, or even as a conference-proceedings article (which are typically not peer-reviewed). It was posted on his blog. Note that his title is "Former Professor," and not "Emeritus Professor" or similar; and at what university? The profile pic on his blog is of a young-ish guy. My gut feeling is that he either didn't make tenure, or, more likely, that he was just an adjunct prof. or lecturer to begin with, and is over-using this association to create a falsely impressive title. Also, this "article" is from 2011, so it's not relevant to this Slashdot thread about 2013 levels of CO2.
Academic dishonesty really pisses me off, so I will note here some of the deficiencies: He uses name-calling and polarizing language in what is purported to be an academic article. In the abstract alone, he says that he uses the "...simplest model possible..." The introduction is laced with more, such as "Physicists have largely abandoned their gadfly role..." He then goes on to call them careerists with no care for truth or science. It is no small wonder that he is clearly an outsider––he doesn't actually do careful studies of phenomena. He's simply a charlatan, and I am wasting my time here to out him as such.
He continues, in the abstract, with, "The double-layer atmosphere model with no free parameters provides:..." Really? His model has no free parameters? That is, it's not a model, but a defined-conclusion (spreadsheet) calculation. He refers to "...the textbook model..." Again, really?!? You claim to be a "former professor" yet you rail against "the textbook model?" What a sad argument to make.
The abstract also includes a line, "All the model predictions robustly follow from the straightforward underlying assumptions without any need for elaborate global circulation models." What?!? Is robustly a word? Your over-simplified model yields the "results" that you were looking for, so you find no need to validate your model? Come on! And what is with the overly complicated language? As Niels Bohr said, "If you can't explain your science to a barmaid, it probably isn't very good science." Or something to that effect.
Continuing, just in the abstract, the author concludes with a significant amount of name-calling (not tolerated in any respectable or even semi-respectable scientific publication): "I conclude with suggested implications regarding warming alarmism, errors by sceptics, research funding, and scientific ignorance regarding climate feedbacks."
Another aspect that sets off the bullshit-alarm of any practicing scientist is his introductory paragraphs. Read it for yourself, if you have time to waste. I am pissed-off that I wasted my time reading any of his crap. I want my time back!
Okay, oh God, what a piece of crap article. I cannot for the life of me get past even the introduction. The derp is just too strong.
Another big bullshit-alarm indicator––overly complicated words and phrases. It's intentionally unreadable in an attempt to cow readers into
I always see this stupid feel-good argument, more normally combined with the 'raise the standard of living' one, every time overpopulation is mentioned. Take a middle class educated family of four in the Third World, and combine their use of resources with a poor rural family of ten or twelve. Which family uses more resources? The smaller one. Probably multiple times as many resources most places.
An educated middle class family in the Third World is going to eat meat several times a week, cooked on a gas or electric stove, stored in an electric refrigerator, in a kitchen in a brick or cement house or apartment with a tile, cement or metal roof and a cement or wood floor. They're going to have potable water, sewage, garbage pickup, electricity, multiple changes of clothing, multiple pairs of shoes, mattresses, sheets, curtains, and pillows. They're going to drive or ride the bus to work and school, listen to the radio during the day and watch television at night. They'll have glass in their windows, handles on their doors, paint on their walls, toilets, showers, staircases, and upholstered furniture.
There aren't enough resources available to provide just the 1,400,000,000 people who currently live on less than a dollar a day that sort of lifestyle, much less the lifestyle associated with falling Western population levels. The only way to do it is to reduce the population to a level where those goods and services can be provided first, which comes out to a really feel-bad solution before you can start to implement your feel-good solution.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin