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Earth's Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Highest Point In 800,000 Years (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: For the first time since humans have been monitoring, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have exceeded 410 parts per million averaged across an entire month (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), a threshold that pushes the planet ever closer to warming beyond levels that scientists and the international community have deemed "safe." The reading from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii finds that concentrations of the climate-warming gas averaged above 410 parts per million throughout April. The first time readings crossed 410 at all occurred on April 18, 2017, or just about a year ago. Carbon dioxide concentrations -- whose "greenhouse gas effect" traps heat and drives climate change -- were around 280 parts per million circa 1880, at the dawn of the industrial revolution. They're now 46 percent higher. According to Scripps Institute of Oceanography, this amount is the highest in at least the past 800,000 years. "We keep burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide keeps building up in the air," said Scripps scientist Ralph Keeling, who maintains the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth. "It's essentially as simple as that."
Prevailing winds bring in fresh, well mixed, air from the oceans and pushes the locally generated CO2 away, whether from cities or volcanoes away from the observatory. This link has more details, and included results from other measuring stations. https://skepticalscience.com/M...
This is bad news among good news. In general, CO2 output levels have been flat or going down in both the US and some other countries for a few years. 2018 is actually the first year in the last 4 where the total CO2 production of the US are going up, while they declined for the previous few years https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-natgas-eia-steo/update-1-u-s-carbon-emissions-seen-at-25-year-low-in-2017-idUSL1N1J311B. But we need to do a lot more. So what can you do to help?
There are three main aspects, personal, political and charitable:
In terms of personal lifestyle differences, the biggest options are to eat less meat and to use a personal car less. If you live somewhere where public transit is an option, you can massively cut down on your carbon footprint by simply using public transit. Not everyone has that option, since you may live somewhere where public transit isn't available or may have a job or family that necessitates getting a car, in which case, if you get a new car, make sure to buy an electric or hybrid. Also in terms of personal activity, one can keep the air conditioning or heating in one's house at not as extreme temperatures or one can better insulate one's house. If one is somewhere installing solar on one's home either for electricity or just for water heating then do it. All these personal changes are also things which overall cause one to save money so there's good reason to do it..
Political change is also important. Much of Europe is taking sensible approaches to these issues (although Germany's anti-nuclear kick isn't helping) but the US is very much not so. In general, the Democrats have a much better record on climate issues and other environmental issues than the current Republicans. This means voting for Democratic candidates and donating to them is important.
In terms of charity, this is a really good way of effecting direct change. Two good options for solar are donating to Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters, and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ who helps get solar panels for locations in the developing world. SELF's work is especially important because it helps to cut off the potential of rising carbon dioxide in the developing world even as it helps increase their economies. For wind power, I recommend donating to The New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund. Also, helping buy carbon offsets is important. The most efficient way of offsetting carbon in terms of tons offset per a dollar spent is Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. Every little bit helps.
Global warming isn't going to kill all life on earth. The tardigrades aren't even going to notice, given they can live in deep sea hydro-thermal vents and deep space.
Global warming is likely to cause severe water and food stress for humans, some regions are likely to become too hot & humid for humans to survive going outside. https://www.ucsusa.org/our-wor...
No, they're saying we don't have direct measurements from before the oldest ice core bores. 800kya is not the year they were higher.
Ezekiel 23:20
So obviously, what happened 800,000 years ago when the average CO2 levels were presumably higher than they are now?
800k is just the end of easy continuous direct CO2 observation from ice cores in their dataset.
You would have to go back a couple million years or more.
Ice ages happen on a timescale of tens of millions of years.
Actually we have had four glacial periods in the last million years.
While it doesn't address what CO2 comes from volcano's, but we can also tell what percent of CO2 is natural vs from burned fossil fuels using carbon isotope ratio from the atmosphere:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
Volcanoes are almost a measurement error these days.
I think he is referring to Kilauea, which is only 20 miles from Mauna Loa, where these CO2 measurements were taken.
But Kilauea wasn't erupting much in April. The new vents are not in Kilauea's main caldera, but are another 20 miles east in Pahoa, and the prevailing winds blow from NE to SW, which is out to sea, not up the slopes of Mauna Loa, which towers more than 9000 feet above the summit of Kilauea.
but IIRC volcanic events are responsible for a lot of CO2.
No they don't, and that is easy to google: https://www.scientificamerican...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Did you ever stop long enough to think that just maybe the rise in CO2 levels were part of a natural feedback
We know that the extra CO2 comes from burning fossil fuels. You can verify this for yourself by taking the published numbers for amounts of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) produced over the last century, and figuring out how much CO2 each produces, and then adding it all up. You'll get a number that's roughly twice the amount of extra CO2 in the atmosphere over the same time.
If you think it's a "natural feedback", then explain where this CO2 is actually coming from, and what happened to all the fossil CO2 we've produced.
Ice core data shows a several-hundred-year lag between rising temperatures and higher CO2.
Rising temperature and higher CO2 form a mutual causal relationship. The path from CO2 to temperature is a lot quicker (few decades max), so you don't recognize it in the graphs.