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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."
Fake News!
These Chinese hoaxers are going too far.
Gonna need more proof on this one. With governments pushing for carbon taxes how do we know this is legit?
Sorry I cant sign off on this bullshit.
when it reaches the levels it was at about 25 million years ago when it was double what it is today.
Well You Say That As If It's A Bad Thing. But Honestly It's The Best Thing There Is.
Ice ages happen on a timescale of tens of millions of years.
Most of the time the earth is not in an ice age, and it can be significantly warmer than the climate is at present. Are people honestly suggesting that we can't or shouldn't adapt to Earth's normal climate?
And the CO2 reading couldn't have anything to do with current events. I mean ... a volcano ... couldn't skew readings. Right? And climatologists have never used skewed findings to fit their hypothesis - so we should never question them.
There's an ongoing eruption event in the region. Could it have been pouring lots of CO2 into the air recently?
I'm sure the research scientists know what they're doing, but IIRC volcanic events are responsible for a lot of CO2. I'd like to see some data from samples collected elsewhere.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
These results are bullshit.. let's see what are the levels going to be like when the nearby volcano is not erupting?? Then if these results persist then tell us about it... until then it's like saying it hurts whet I try and breath the air from the exhaust of my vw beetle... it shouldn't be done!!!
http://reason.com/blog/2018/05/04/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-down-europea
"Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.4% in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes (Gt), a resumption of growth after three years of global emissions remaining flat. The increase in CO2 emissions, however, was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise, some others experienced declines, including the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan. The biggest decline came from the United States, mainly because of higher deployment of renewables."
Been said a million times before: CO2 is not a pollutant. It's needed for plants to grow. The current CO2 levels are so low it's amazing plants survive at all. We'd be much better off if CO2 levels tripled from current levels.
All this sky is falling bullshit is about raising taxes and the socialist elite controlling the rest of us.
If you're not socialist elite and worried about CO2 levels, you're just one of their sheep.
So obviously, what happened 800,000 years ago when the average CO2 levels were presumably higher than they are now?
So what you're saying is, they were higher 800,000 years ago.
We are burning fuel, transforming materials, and using energy, all at a rate that has never before been done in the planet's history. Naturally there is a proportionate spike.
Obviously, the climate ran away and killed all life on Earth.
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.
Capitalist dinosaurs of course.
1880 was pretty much the end of the industrial revolution. Its "dawn" is variously put at between 1780 (takeoff of large-scale mechanisation) and 1830 (opening of the first intercity railway), though some historians like to date it right back to 1760 (first industrial uses of steam power).
One side says that it is nothing called 'Climate change', it is just a frequent period of millions of years ago. But the other side thinks this phenomenon really serious. And I prefer the second thought.
WilliamReview.com
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...
CO2 levels are as high as they have every been... yet warming continues to be very minor. How much more does CO2 have to rise before you accept the truth that CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming? Twice again the current level?
At least the plants are happy, even if some of humanity (well, the easily misled portion) is dour.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Belly up warmist fuckwidths ... got that Co2 tanks ready for you to start breathing. Learning is a snap, and the steel canister no-problemo cause you ain't gonna last too long. Breath deep poly-sluts and feel that loss of awareness? Kinda natural eh bitchboi and tatoo-gurl?? Hehehehe ... Lots of O2 for the productive yeomanry ... damn-little for warmist Trotsky turds. Die fast bitches die ... hard ...
800,000 years is as far back as it's possible to make any kind of plausible estimate. We don't know what the level was before then, although the pattern throughout the 800,000 years we do know about fluctuates between about 180 ppm (in ice ages) and 300 ppm. There is no strong indication that it was significantly higher before then.
That's a mean way to describe Republicans. You apologize now!
Table-ized A.I.
Rumor has it the ocean was +100 feet and the global average surface temperature +10 deg F
CO2 doesn't cause warming since there is almost nothing of it in the air. Plants are CO2 limited.
There is no strong indication that it was significantly higher before then.
No strong indication?
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.
Like a volcanic eruption in progress ... a single few hours long eruption can emit millions of pounds of CO2. In the case of Hawaii, the eruption is a long ongoing progress. So maybe these figures are suspect.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
If the f*cks I don't give were money, I'd be retired.
And yet we are still alive....
Those kanakas aren't the brightest bulbs in the box.
Plants will be growing like gangbusters. So good!
This is 100% pure unadulterated lies.
Slashdot: Lies for Nerds- Fantasy that Matters
I would venture that 1760 is the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution, which is when the first steam engines started becoming commercially available, used in mining coal (to power more steam engines), pumps, manufacturing clothing and machining parts.
First steam engines started traveling across the UK in 1810, and around Europe by the 1830s.
Electricity starts becoming a part of the equation in 1880 for use with motors and lights. This isn't the Dawn, this is like mid-day.
Mass production cars and the first airplanes show up in the 1903-1910s.
I'd say the Information Age starts with the first world wide web usage explosion in the 1990s, which took about fifteen years from when the first consumer computers started showing up.
Seriously. Stop overconsuming and stop preaching. We know. We all know. Very few of us are willing to make personal changes. Im talking to you, dumpy fucks. Your car hauls around an extra 100lbs of lard that you consume to support. You buy everything new because ew second hand is icky. This is your damned mess, not mine.
We better stop those damned volcanoes from erupting!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
We can live off Trump's farts.
most likely nothing, the reliable ice core measurements ran out.
Trump says so.
I'd wish it were a joke but it is not.
That's the effect of denuclearization: more coal. If they're using more coal, they are doing it wrong. It's foolish to compete nuclear vs renewables until the last coal plant and mine is eliminated permanently.
Maybe someone should stop cutting down the Amazon rainforest?
It's just a suggestion; feel free to put profit above everything else.
Requiem for the American Dream
It hit me on the head!
DOOM!
DOOOM!
DOOOOOM!
At this point, if there's nothing that can be done about it, fuck off.
Come up with an actual engineering solution for carbon sequestration that can be implemented and would be EFFECTIVE.
Then come crying to us about how "We's all gonna die!"
He should apologise to the dinosaurs.
" United States, mainly because of higher deployment of renewables"
I bet it was from transferring US steel, aluminum production to China. Stupid Whitey thinks that is progress.
Many large users of carbon resources in electricity generation, such as the United States,[12][13] Russia, and China, are resisting carbon taxation. And carbon taxation as implemented in most nations is worthless. Why? Because consumers are not the deciders of the vast majority of Co2 emissions. The single largest source of Co2 remains electricity, and that is not something the average consumers can choose from the grid. The third largest is actually transportation. Yeah, at the moment, America fleet mpg appears to be going down (and co2 up from ), but that is about to change. EVs are coming in a big way over the next couple of years mostly with commercial trucks. The real problem remains that coal plants continue to be added esp in China. Until adfitional coal plants ( not replacement ) is stooped, co2 will continue its massive growth.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Carbon based life will last longer, now a depleted nutrient is being replenished slightly. Our job is to prevent asteroid extinction events and prevail.
Greenhouse gas theory ignores entropy and convection in the troposphere.
Plants are going crazy. Carbon has no business being in the ground. Though it would be nice if it whould happen a bit slower, i agree on that.
Come up with an actual engineering solution for carbon sequestration that can be implemented and would be EFFECTIVE.
Then come crying to us about how "We's all gonna die!"
You are making no sense. If that happened, nobody would be saying that. It follows that because we don't have access to fantasy/sci-fi technology, many will.
Hey, maybe they should look at what amount of carbon sequestering has/is being destroyed for industrial profits as well.
STOP SHOVING GUILT UPON THE NORMAL PEOPLE WHO GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Grab those who made it this way, the rich and scruples...
Nothing but onesided visions for what purpose really ? shove more taxes our way maybe ??? Great manipulation of the masses there.
So obviously, what happened 800,000 years ago when the average CO2 levels were presumably higher than they are now?
What happened was that people didn't live in any of the places we have coastal cities now.
Monetary damage aside, relocating the billion humans who live less than 30 feet above water is going to cause trouble if the oceans were to rise that far.
There is ice enough to bring it up 200 feet.
Even if you aren't among those who has to move because of the water you will still be impacted by it.
People do what they need to survive and if humanitarian aid isn't given to those in need things will get really ugle really fast.
NO! We are not going to pay you a carbon tax, get it into your heads.
In a new report, scientists report higher CO2 levels now than ever since they were first measured in 1880. They further report that these are the highest levels for at least the past 800,000 years. QED: 1880 was actually over 800,000 years ago. I learn something new every day!
Wow, the headline admits that the global climate is cyclical by pointing out that long before humans had any impact on the Earth, the Earth had been just as polluted as it is today.
If the general population in the United States actually cared and felt this was an important issue - then the Senate, House and Oval office wouldn't be run by people who adamantly scream this is a liberal hoax.
They are busy appointing judges who will rule in favor of the corporate oligarchy doing exactly what we're seeing: disincentivizing renewable energy, disemboweling clean air/water laws, doling out tax breaks to polluters, attacking scientific processes and thought, defunding education to eliminate critical thinking skills... and they are winning. Only 1/2 of Americans believe global warming is real. http://news.gallup.com/poll/20...
And other BS/disproven ideas are on rise - like Immunizations cause autism and the growth of flat earthers... Till we value and fund education and critical thinking, we're lost.
I am tired of you reporting false non-scientific data!
Born and raised in the southeast US. There is no such thing as "too hot, too humid" unless you are giant menstruating pussy of a man.
Data clearly shows shows climate change is non-anthropogenic so why all the fuss?
I'm speaking of the real data, not the data manipulated and altered by NOAA, NASA and AMOS.
I had a old diesel car that was highly fuel efficient and had relatively low CO2 output but have switched to a 'highly efficient' petrol car that is not efficient at all compared to my diesel one (It gets 380 miles out of a 40 litre tank vs the 600 miles the diesel got out of 35 litres) and also produces about 50% more CO2.
Why?
Because my diesel car was Euro 3 and subject to a crippling daily charge to be in the zone where I live.
They need to figure out what the hell they want to happen instead of flip-flopping between one and another. We can't all afford to go out and buy gigantic short range electric cars at the drop of a hat, or have the infrastructure to store and charge them at our homes.
We're all dead now.
So obviously, what happened 800,000 years ago when the average CO2 levels were presumably higher than they are now?
Actually, that's just the end point of the dataset they used. So CO2 levels are higher than what their entire dataset tells them. No particular event, just ran out of data that they had at the ready. So I guess a more accurate headline might be, "CO2 levels higher than all 800,000 years of data that a group of scientist have access to." It's a bit wordy though.
Everything else is staying the same. (and the attribution of the temperature increase is more complex than this: there are greenhouse gases even less common than CO2 which have a much larger effect per molecule).
Going from 2.9K to 290K isn't mostly due to greenhouse gases, but delta changes on 290K are, and the human-level effects of even small changes in climate (on physics Kelvin scale) are big.
And finally, a sort of WAG guess based on 1 of 2500 molecules is rather ignorant and useless compared to the computations and experiments scientists have done over literally a century on this specific problem, using everything known about electromagnetism, chemistry and quantum mechanics.
Has been in service for a very long time, more than 50 years IIRC. It's there precisely to keep local emission sources from skewing the results.
When they say that the CO2 levels are the highest ever, that's not one isolated reading made yesterday! That's just the latest of more than 50 years of measurements. And those measurements have been ticking upwards like a metronome for more than 50 years.
There is no sudden "burst" of CO2. The local volcanic eruption has does not "back date" 50 years of measurement history. Trying to put any blame on the recent volcanism is a complete misunderstanding of what is going on here. The announcements made in this case are solid. In fact the trend line is so well-established, they could have made this announcement back in the 1970's, and simply extrapolated the 2018 CO2 level using a ruler.
Is that you Donald?
Born and raised in the southeast U.S. mean you don't know what hot is. 136 degrees even when it is dry is too hot. Hell, here in the Southwest our signs actually melt because it gets so hot.
Just about every protein unique (or largely confined) to the human species is presently at its highest level in the last 800,000 years; and probably another 10 million industrial compounds, of which maybe 100,000 were intentional, and the other 99% being random and undesired by products around the margins of the defined process (even the smallest amounts discarded instead of destroyed would lead to record-setting environmental levels over a billion-year historical time scale).
What makes CO2 special is that we worked a little harder to crack this nut.
Current cumulative industrial emissions of CO2 is presently on the order of 33,000 million metric tonnes (Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1850–2030). That's 33 petagrams in base metric units, once you collect all the distributed zeros together.
How many chemicals exist on planet earth in excess of 30 Pg?
The entire earth's biosphere clocks in at 1–4 Eg. We can start by eliminating any biological chemical that accounts for less than 1% of the entire biosphere.
Goodbye, glucose, at 3–8 g per human body. ATP? Nope. Glycogen? Closer, but still no cigar. Cellulose stands a chance, if we're generous about counting molecular D-glucose units, rather than actual molecules. Perhaps one lipid, the most common chain length of all fats?
And what if earth had blessed us with ten (or one hundred) Middle East oil fields, where gasoline practically gushes out in finished form? The newly acidic oceans would be halfway sterile of yummy megafauna, but fertilizer for use in terrestrial agriculture would have been practically free.
Not better, not worse; just different.
But cross your fingers God keeps his promise about not sending a second flood, because Noah 2.0's ocean pantry would be exceedingly slim pickings. Yes, a merciful God wipes the slate clean before you waltz off the boat, procreate vigorously, and then discover mass geological reserves of buried hydrocarbons to rival the entirety of God's respiring endowment.
How much is too much? 3 Pg? 30 Pg? 300 Pg? 3 Eg? 30 Eg? Do stop me when your anthropogenic spidey sense reaches its in-built marble ark threat-detection threshold.
We let volcanos release 600 million tons of CO2 every year, we even let the CO2 release rates increase greatly in last few decades.
https://www.livescience.com/40451-volcanic-co2-levels-are-staggering.html
Who knew Trump was causing it decades ago?
OH No!
Weâ(TM)re gonna die unless we make Al Gore a billionaire and Bill Gates a Trillionaire
of this planet. Move along, nothing to see here but BeauHD in the daily bid to push the agenda.
Measurements could be tainted because there's been a lot of volcanic activity in Hawaii.
When ice covered most of North America and starving was a fact of life. :)
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.
And likely, some areas are going to become nicer/more habitable.
Which're those places?
There're bound to be winners and losers.
If you only ever hear about the losers... I smell something
In order to play the science game, we need the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis to start off with. To wit,
1) a list of observations, which if observed, mean a hypothesis is false;
2) a logical argument that the lack of those falsifications means that a hypothesis must be favored over all others (including the null).
While playing with models while dressing in white lab coats may look "sciencey", it doesn't become scientific until it starts following the scientific method - and that means having a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Now, there are those that would suggest that we can avoid the need for the scientific method, and simply use Bayesian analysis to reach the truth, but any statistical method that avoids the cornerstone of falsifiability opens up the world to making astrology scientific, simply based on probability distributions. There's a great opportunity for interesting discovery with Bayesian methods, but a lot more risk of false positives. In fact, given enough creativity, the false positive can be actively mined for.
Same thing ;-)
Tardigrades living in space, are you a star trek discovery writer? Well done on the pun, intentional or otherise.
Good news for the plants then. The higher the CO2 level - the better plants will grow.
This AC's claim is false.
Plant leaves have pockets in their surfaces called stomata, within which the actual gas exchanges take place. The concentration of stomata (count per sq.mm of surface) varies with atmospheric CO2 concentration - which has been verified in greenhouses.
In the fossil record, you get fossil plants. You need good preservation - which is uncommon, but not unknown. From stomata counts on different genera of plants, you can estimate the level of CO2 concentration in which those plants grew.
Yes, the error-bars are looser than for an IR or GCMS measurement of CO2 concentration on a mountain today. But we can know what the atmospheric CO2 concentration was at enough points in the past to construct curves of CO2 concentration against time.
All of which has been well reported in the geological press for literally decades (it was new to the text books when I read it in 1980). So the AC is either disingenuous or ignorant.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Thank god they got rid of those SUV 800,000 years ago
Whats ironic is that the recent times where its been warmer, like the MWP, the amount of food produced went up dramatically.
And please, how come noone seriously looks at the solar cycles, which had a much greater correlation to temperatures both recent and geological, as opposed to models and predictions from the likes of the IPCC that have a >97% inaccuracy rate.
These articles crack me up.
You can't even keep your lies straight... Where did the other 50 go !!
The planet isn't some civ game, you can't just move an entire country of people halfway across the globe to the new green area
Greenland being habitable or the American southwest getting what doesn't do anything about the billions of people living in areas that are slowly getting fucked
Ugh, it's because they have looked at that and there is no correlation and you're actually just making shit up
So you're an idiot and a liar, great combo!