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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?
Dupe.
wtf is a megayear? I only know gigadays.
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.
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.
sheesh. 640 kilayears should be enough for anybody
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
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
actually, for 95% of the population 32 kilodays is sufficient :(
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mya
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