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."

Comments

queue the denialists!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:queue the denialists!

[Anonymous Coward]

The ones profiting from fucking up the planet are to blame. They have, however, managed to school us into accepting their reality - that we all are in control, individually.

They've taught us, through millions of 30 second tv-spots and with a little help from collaborators, that their world - the "free" market economy is somehow normal and natural, a basic truth and not an ideology of greed and lying and cold blooded disdain for human weakness while every other ideology, of compassion and sharing, for example, is old-fashioned and silly.

"'free' market" you write - so you know that it isn't a free market. As to the ones profiting, do you include teachers' unions? If not, why not? They are just one of thousands of groups (whether a union, business, department, politician) that can be blamed.

Almost half (~40%) of US GDP is spent by the government directly. Of similar magnitude are all the mandated or propped up industries. Regulation compliance, fields with limited competition (doctors/lawyers, anything with government patents or copyright), and mandatory insurance (auto/health) which is really mandatory skimming of the associated costs (I.E., and incredibly dumb fucktarded proposition to force purchase of anything).

Of course, you mention no specifics beyond "eating the rich" and "fucking shit up". I'm not sure how warmongering is going to decrease CO2? As for attacking the rich, same thing.

We make good money manufacturing insulation which is used to DRAMATICALLY decrease CO2 consumption. If we become rich off this... is it OK for you to eat us or fuck up our shit?

As for anarchism, I'm down with it as an anarcho-capitalist (technically also a minarchist/voluntaryist type too - I'm not going to stake a flag in one specific area without better definitions). But I don't advocate murder or fucking people up!!!

Who mod's this interesting, "eating the rich, fucking shit up"??? I hate to Ayn Randian on you, but I have little doubt that the rich are - in your case - morally superior. You set the bar so low, it would be hard to find worse scum.

Re:queue the denialists!

[rusty0101]

As pointed out by Lionel Dricot at http://ploum.net/post/the-cost-of-being-convinced, there is a cost of changing your position. A large number of climate deniers have invested themselves in the position they have taken, and unless they can find a benefit to changing their position that outweighs the investment they have made, they are likely to stand firm in their state of denial.

Potentially a far more useful technique, than bashing them over the head with the facts, is to start by having them review the facts surrounding the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and then ask them to provide proposals as to why those levels have changed in the timeframe they have. That engages them in the process of actually doing science, as once they have proposed a hypothesis as to what may be causing an increase in CO2, those hypotheses can be tested. (I.e. it's the destruction of the rainforest - what does satellite data show about the circulation of O2 generated in the rainforest? It tends to stay in the area of the rainforests. Volcanoes emit CO2! Have we seen a tremendous increase in volcanic activity in the past century? No. Etc.) Start getting them to invest in looking at possibilities that can be tested, rather than having them try to change their minds based on decisions they have invested in.

Nah, it probably won't work, but it seems to me to be better than trying to sit and debate the topic with people who've come to the table already decided that no matter what the logic of proof that's provided, they are not going to change their position.

Re:Megayears?

[Kaenneth]

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

[Hentes]

Dupe.

Re:LOL

[noh8rz10]

wtf is a megayear? I only know gigadays.

Re:CO2 at an active volcano? Who wudda thot?

[noh8rz10]

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?

Re:CO2 at an active volcano? Who wudda thot?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

> 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?

Re: Stop breathing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is /., so mission accomplished.

Re:LOL

[pixelpusher220]

sheesh. 640 kilayears should be enough for anybody

Re:LOL

[pipatron]

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".

Re:CO2 at an active volcano? Who wudda thot?

[jcupitt65]

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

Re:LOL

[noh8rz10]

actually, for 95% of the population 32 kilodays is sufficient :(

Re:Stop breathing

[The Wild Norseman]

or you could just strap a fern to your face

I don't particularly care what her name is, just get her over here!

Re:LOL

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Why not? This proves Warmists are wrong.

[Dahamma]

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.

Re: Why not? This proves Warmists are wrong.

[lgw]

. 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".

Re:The CO2 change IS NOT 40%!

[close_wait]

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.

Re: Why not? This proves Warmists are wrong.

[dryeo]

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.