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Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record

mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of carbon dioxide gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA's latest results. “It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone."

16 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Milestone my ass by craighansen · · Score: 5, Informative
  2. Re:Meh by Squiddie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess the amount of money that will be spent dealing with the coming mess, the lives that will be ruined, and ocean levels are just arbitrary numbers as well.

  3. Re:Milestone my ass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No correlation as in this picture? Denial gets more desperate by the day.

  4. Re:Meh by craighansen · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was predictable based upon the Keeling curve, which has a seasonal oscillation based upon northern hemisphere plant growth. http://www.climatecentral.org/... About two years ago, the peaks of the CO2 concentration measured at Mauna Kea exceeded 400 ppm. Now the average is 400ppm, and in about two years, the trough of the CO2 concentration will exceed 400ppm.

    The way things are going that'll be the last point we see 400ppm until the next extinction event.

  5. Re:Milestone my ass by riverat1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The proof that CO2 does not drive climate is to be found during the Ordovician-Silurian and the Jurassic-Cretaceous periods when CO2 levels were greater than 4000 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and about 2000 ppmv respectively. If the IPCC theory is correct, there should have been runaway greenhouse induced global warming during these periods but instead there was glaciation.

    You can't ignore the fact that the Sun was dimmer back then and the topology of the continents was completely different. CO2 isn't the only factor in the Earth's climate, just the most important greenhouse gas in determining it. (If you want to chime in and claim that water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, it's true that WV causes the largest effect of the greenhouse gases but WV is a condensing gas under conditions in the Earth's atmosphere and the level is strictly controlled by temperature. Water vapor can not drive climate change.)

  6. Re:The Jurassic DGW, Dinosaurogenic Global Warming by XXongo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!

    So, you're basically chiming in here to agree with the global climate models. There was more carbon dioxide in the paleozoic, and the climate was warmer. Yep. The climate was warmer, and the dinosaurs lived with it Of course, the planet didn't have any ice caps then, and a lot of what we call "farmland" they called "shallow ocean".

    We probably won't get the dinosaurs back, though.

  7. Re:"The Polar Bears will be fine" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't be so damn deceitful. His quote in Context:

    "In a 2014 interview, he said that "What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate ... It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled.""
    Hard work involves more studies, and more money.

    Dyson, like Muller, believes that the Science isn't settled; it very rarely is. Also, like Muller, Dyson believes that there is Global Warming going on, and (that)
    ""global warming" (is/)as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change..."
    It's Real, and we Dunnit.
    His somewhat pessimistic view is that there is no longer anything that we can do about it, except study it, and prepare for the worst, and put more effort into things that we can do something about.

    Now before I get crucified, I should like to point out that if you liquified the Atmosphere, it would only be some 30 meters thick, and you could see through it.
    The biggest, and least understood, part of modeling Climate Change is the World's Oceans; which are somewhat deeper than 30 meters, and if I remember correctly, is some 40000 times more massive than the Atmosphere.
    The Oceans _are_ getting warmer, and because of dissolved CO2, are more acidic. (This may actually be a form of long-term Climate regulating cycles, but it is happening too damn quick.)

  8. Re:So when will this actually happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think you are confusion sensationalist media reports with the actual science. As far as the science is concerned, we're on the same track we've been on for 20 years..

  9. Re:Bit to belabor the obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, I'm 100% sure that they just walked up there, plopped it down, and it didn't even *occur* to anyone at NOAA to consider the volcano thing.

    Jesus fucking fuck, what the hell IS it with you people on slashdot who think that the first "insight" you have five seconds after thinking of something for the first time in your life hasn't occurred to people who do it for a living? Here's a hint: If you were *that* smart you wouldn't be talking shit on Slashdot.

  10. Re:Hmm by david_bonn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wow, so /. is going to post monthly updates to CO2 but not monthly updates on the 18 years and 5 months of flat temperatures? The latter is news worthy, CO2 concentrations if you've been watching it, are jumping up and down as if life is consuming it. Like it was food for something which isnt human...

    Meanwhile someone discovers a link between Sun pollution, magnatism, heat transfer between planets and the 'void' which may explain away "Dark Energy" as simply being sun pollution. Unspent electrons. Energy for star ships.

    Yet /. is more focused on cutting off it's nose to spite its face?

    What kind of future does /. want to see? One where we're all accountable for creating food to feed plants and be chastised for it based upon "green" ideology? "Green" ideology which says food for plants is making the planet hotter because CO2 is a "greenhouse gas"? *ALL GASES IN THE ATMOSPHERE ARE GREENHOUSE GASES * because they all absorb some energy vs not having an atmosphere at all!

    Oh gosh, where does on start.

    I guess I'll take a simple approach.

    Svante Arrhenius showed in 1896 that CO2 absorbs much more infrared radiation than Nitrogen or Oxygen, which is nice because it keeps our planet from being an ice ball. CO2 levels then were around 300 ppm.

    CO2 levels today are about 400ppm, that is the highest they have been in 800,000 years. And no, CO2 levels weren't this high 800,000 years ago. That is just how far back we can go with ice cores.

    Human activity, mostly burning fossil fuels, is pumping 36 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

    If you don't buy human-caused climate change, explain to me which one of those facts you disagree with. Or explain to me how you interpret them.
    Reference: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c...

  11. Re:So when will this actually happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Who moderated this fucking idiot up? Other idiots?

    Ozone is still here, because of Montreal Protocol. Read up about it!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

    You know why we no longer have Acid Rain? Cap and trade. Read up about it!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

    It does not take a few years to cause noticeable change in Global Warming. It takes centuries. Maybe your great-great-great-grandkids will intent a timemachine and shoot you for your own stupidity, because it will be them that will be affected. It will also be them that will not be able to do anything about it, except to invent a time machine.

    Nothing resolved itself. People took action, and you fucking idiot don't even bother to figure out that someone else saved your sorry ass.

  12. Re:So when will this actually happen? by unimacs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The ozone was being depleted by chlorofluorocarbons. International efforts were able to largely phase them out, and the Ozone layer has recovered.

    One of the first predictions of running out of oil was made in 1914 by the Bureau of Mines. They thought the world would run out in 10 years. There have been similar predictions since then. Why haven't they come true? Because huge sums of money have been invested in making sure we don't run out or at least to put it off as long as possible. Billions and billions have been spent on locating more oil, and figuring out how to extract the relatively small amounts of oil that are in places we already know about. Think about some the crazy stuff we do to get oil out of the ground even in the middle of the ocean.

    One of the consequences has been that the price of oil has gone up over time. It's slumped back down for now, just like it did in the 90's but it rose after that and you can bet it will again. If in the early 90's you had told somebody that gas would cost almost $4.00 a gallon in a decade, they would have thought armageddon was coming.

    In both the case of the ozone layer and oil supplies, the dire predictions didn't happen in large part because we did what was necessary to keep them from happening. Same thing with Y2K. A ton of money was spent updating computers and software.

    And we could avoid the problems being predicted as consequences of global warming if we take action and be willing to spend some money. But for some reason, we'd rather just argue about it whether it's really a problem or not and in the meantime the solutions just get more expensive and likelihood of widespread consequences increase.

  13. Re: Meh by Bruha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Led lights, fuel efficient cars. We have choices to help fix things. But you fuckers get bent out of shape just trying to get you to use a different light bulb.

  14. Re:"The Polar Bears will be fine" by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with focusing on the fringe like this is that the fringe rapidly becomes a straw man argument for environmentalists. If you actually go to the Greenpeace web site and read their policies they don't suggest any of the stuff you mention, but every debate on Slashdot about environmental issues claims that they do.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  15. Re:Meh by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's only true if you define historic average to include billions of years when we were NOT here (making your second sentence erm... dumb).
    We were evolved for a temperate climate, we did not evolve in the carboniferous age, we almost certainly could not have survived then - we have no guarantee we can survive in any climate other than the one we evolved in - and this is far above the average for ANY period in that age.

    We merely need to look at the recorded history of much SMALLER climate events in our history to see how badly adapted we are to significant changes in global climate. Krakatoa went off in 1883 - not that long ago and technologically VERY recent. 1884 was Europe's year without a summer - just one year where a major event disrupted the normal climate pattern hugely (dust from the volcano blocked the sun out over Europe).
    Go look up the death toll of that... there previous thing to get anywhere close to that many dead bodies in Europe was the black death, more people died from that double-winter than from the Spanish Flu in 1918 and World War 1 combined.
    Many killed by the cold itself, many more starved because of the resulting crop failures.

    And that was relatively tiny, it only really affected one continent - and only for one year (on the upside: it directly led to the writing of Frankenstein).

    Now imagine something like that, on a global scale, lasting decades or centuries... you talk of historic averages but you carefully leave out context. Massive climate changes like that have, historically, been responsible for the largest mass extinctions in the history of our planet. Indeed, far more dinosaurs were made extinct by the nuclear winter CAUSED by the asteroid than were killed by the asteroid impact itself. And COLD is a LOT easier to deal with than hot.
    The largest extinction event that ever happened, the Cambrian mass extinction killed 96% of all living organisms at the time - and the most likely cause of it was significant climate change caused by living organisms altering the atmosphere.

    In context your trite dismissal is not as convincing as you thought now is it. Also - there is no need for US to die for a climate event to make us extinct, technology could help us cope with a climate change perhaps... but it may not save us, because we are not an independent species, our survival depends on the eco-systems we are a part off, which is made up of ALL the other species alive today. None of which has technology... take too many of them out, and we'll go too. Technology can't provide us with food when none of our crops can grow anymore. It can't protect us when mosquitos grow 1m wingspans (which they have done before and could again in the right climate conditions).

    But go ahead, fuck with something you don't understand for a bit of convenience. Since YOU don't understand it you get to dismiss the people who DO understand it without evidence and carry on regardless right ?

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  16. Re:Bit to belabor the obvious by mystuff · · Score: 5, Informative

    And here's the explanation:

    Isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at over 11,000 feet above sea level, the upper north face of Mauna Loa volcano is an ideal location to make measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that reflect global trends, not local influences such as factories or forests that might boost or drop carbon dioxide within their vicinity. The CO2 sensors at Mauna Loa are positioned such that they sample an incoming breeze direct from the ocean, unaffected by human activities, vegetation or other factors on the island. (The Mauna Loa Observatory is high enough that the incoming breeze rides above the thermal inversion layer.)

    Volcanoes are considerable sources of carbon dioxide themselves. However, the sampling location was chosen to be normally upwind of Mauna Loa's vent, and Keeling perfected methods for detecting and correcting intervals when the wind blew the wrong way.

    Measurements at about 100 other sites have confirmed the long-term trend shown by the Keeling Curve, although no sites have a record as long as Mauna Loa.

    Source: http://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/keeling_curve