CO2 Levels Likely To Stay Above 400PPM For The Rest of Our Lives, Study Shows (inhabitat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new study from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere are likely to remain above 400 parts per million (ppm) for many years. Specifically, scientists forecasted that levels would not dip below 400pm in "our lifetimes." The CO2 concentrations of "about 450ppm or lower are likely to maintain warming below 2 degrees Celsius over the 21st century relative to pre-industrial levels." However, lead author on the paper Richard Betts said we could pass that number in 20 years or less. In an article on The Guardian, he said even if we reduce emissions immediately, we might be able to delay reaching 450ppm but "it is still looking like a challenge to stay below 450ppm." El Nino has played a significant role in climbing carbon dioxide levels, but it's likely we'll see higher CO2 levels than the last large El Nino storm during 1997 and 1998 because "manmade emissions" have risen by 25 percent since that storm, according to The Guardian. Met Office experts predicted in November 2015 that in May 2016 "mean concentrations of atmospheric CO2" would hit 407.57ppm -- the actual figure was 407.7ppm. The NOAA reported during 2015 that the "annual growth rate" of CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 3.05ppm. NOAA lead scientist Pieter Tans said, "Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years. It's explosive compared to the natural processes."

Comments

The denialists need to be dealt with somehow.

[Anonymous Coward]

The science is in, the numbers are not fake, this is not a hoax. This is going to have serious global repercussions and it will never go away. We can't even yet stop contributing to the acceleration of emissions, they CONTINUE to grow year by year despite much-touted international accords. The science community agrees this will not be enough, and we are failing at this course correction necessity.

At some point, the people being paid and those paying millions to put out the unreasonable position that this all is "no big deal" or "not certain to be a problem" or "not caused by human industry" etc, those people have to be dealt with. I make no suggestions beyond that general observation, that this is untenable.

Re:The denialists need to be dealt with somehow.

[mark-t]

It really doesn't matter, quite honestly. There is absolutely squat that people who give a damn about this can actually do that will make a difference, because there's far too many people who don't care what the world might be like in a hundred years, as long as they get to live the way they want to right now.

Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow.

[riverat1]

Maybe if you paid attention to what the scientists have actually been saying instead of listening to hyperbolic ranters you would understand the actual time scale of the predictions.

Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow.

[MightyMartian]

The problem is that the people haven't been listening to the scientists. They've been listening to hyperbolic supporters and equally dishonest detractors. The scientists have always insisted that there are error bars built into their projections, but that all the projections agree that serious problems are coming. And serious problems are already here. The insurance industry knows AGW's effects are already happening. Scientists in various other fields like marine biology and oceanography know its happening. Even the Kochs know it's happening. For chrissakes, the Saudis have created the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know they'll be lucky to have another half century to pull profits out of the ground.

The only reason this game is being played out is so that the fossil fuel profiteers can milk a few more years out of that resource before solutions like carbon pricing are implemented on a large scale. But make no mistake, even the major oil companies have known for decades that the product they're pulling out of the ground is leading to major climatological changes.

At this point, what we're seeing is merely a pack of paid professional oil company shills who don't even have any credibility with their paymasters. Oh, and a bizarre gang of Liberarians who seem to believe that the Invisible Hand is capable of suppressing CO2's energy absorption and emission properties, because, you know, Communism!!!!!

Re: The denialists need to be dealt with somehow.

[Geoffrey.landis]

The "scientists" are looking at ~120 years of data and make predictions reaching thousands of years into the future.

Nope. The scientists are applying the physics of infrared heat transfer to the atmosphere of the Earth.

This is a pretty well known subject-- in fact, you have to have the greenhouse effect, or else the Earth would have an average temperature below freezing. We know the greenhouse effect of trace gasses in the atmosphere is real.

The denialists are basically saying "well, the physics of heat transfer may be well known, but when you apply it to the carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere, somehow it's now different."

No, actually, it's not.

Re:Good news for a change

[riverat1]

Actually the holy book would be the IPCC reports. The nice thing about anthropogenic global warming as a religion is that it has actual scientific evidence to back it up. If you want to suggest that the primary cause is something other than human activity you need to come up with some actual scientific evidence of your own that holds up under scrutiny.

Re:Like most of Earth's existence?

[riverat1]

Of course it has been under 1,000 ppm for the entire existence of humans.

But the real problem isn't the level of CO2 but how fast it is changing. If it slowly rose to 1,000 ppm over 10,000 years or more then life would have time to adapt. At the rate it's going it could hit 1,000 in less than 200 years and that's going to cause lots of disruption. It remains to be seen how well our civilization will cope with it.

Re:insightful and considered opinions expected

[The Real Dr John]

The first post nailed it. Just take a look through the comments to see how incapable the /. crowd is at having a reasonable, intelligent discussion anymore. Off topic instantly, into political chest pounding immediately. Nothing about how burning fossil fuels is responsible for the constant rise in CO2 and the subsequent impacts on the biosphere and polar ice. Coral bleaching is reaching levels never seen before due to ocean acidification, which will get much worse as the CO2 level continues to rise. I understand it is the job of the corporate shills here to "muddy the waters" and manufacture doubt and insult everyone, but I just wish everyone else would stop taking the bait, and don't even respond to them anymore, no matter how obnoxious they are.

Re: Good news for a change

[dywolf]

The medical term for what you're doing is called "projection".

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/...
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/C...

The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to “hiding the decline” isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The “decline” actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

The "trick," which was used in a paper published in 1998 in the science journal Nature, is to combine the older tree ring data with thermometer data. Combining the two data sets can be difficult, and scientists are always interested in new ways to make temperature records more accurate.

Tree rings are a largely consistent source of data for the past 2,000 years. But since the 1960s, scientists have noticed there are a handful of tree species in certain areas that appear to indicate temperatures that are warmer or colder than we actually know they are from direct thermometer measurement at weather stations.

"Hiding the decline" in this email refers to omitting data from some Siberian trees after 1960. This omission was openly discussed in the latest climate science update in 2007 from the IPCC, so it is not "hidden" at all.

Why Siberian trees? In the Yamal region of Siberia, there is a small set of trees with rings that are thinner than expected after 1960 when compared with actual thermometer measurements there. Scientists are still trying to figure out why these trees are outliers. Some analyses have left out the data from these trees after 1960 and have used thermometer temperatures instead.

Techniques like this help scientists reconstruct past climate temperature records based on the best available data.

Much has been made about emails regarding a certain paper that some scientists did not think should have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. These emails focus on a paper on solar variability in the climate over time. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal called Climate Research, but under unusual circumstances. Half of the editorial board of Climate Research resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process. The paper, which argued that current warming was unexceptional, was disputed by scientists whose work was cited in the paper. Many subsequent publications set the record straight, which demonstrates how the peer review process over time tends to correct such lapses. Scientists later discovered that the paper was funded by the American Petroleum Institute.

In a later e-mail, Phil Jones references two other papers he didn't hold in high esteem. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Yet, the papers in question made it into the IPCC report, indicating that no restrictions on their incorporation were made. The IPCC process contains hundreds of authors and reviewers, with an e