Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Highest in Human History
Source: New York Times
The amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a record in May, continuing its relentless climb, scientists said Friday. It is now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average, before humans began the widespread burning of oil, gas and coal in the late 19th century. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at anytime in at least 4 million years, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said.
The concentration of the gas reached nearly 421 parts per million in May, the peak for the year, as power plants, vehicles, farms and other sources around the world continued to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Emissions totaled 36.3 billion tons in 2021, the highest level in history. As the amount of carbon dioxide increases, the planet keeps warming, with effects like increased flooding, more extreme heat, drought and worsening wildfires that are already being experienced by millions of people worldwide. Average global temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than in preindustrial times.
Growing carbon dioxide levels are more evidence that countries have made little progress toward the goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic effects of climate change increases significantly. They are "a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation," Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, said in a statement. Although carbon dioxide levels dipped somewhat around 2020 during the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there was no effect on the long-term trend, Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in an interview.
The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentration "just kept on going," he said. "And it keeps on going for about the same pace as it did for the past decade." Carbon dioxide levels vary throughout the year, increasing as vegetation dies and decays in the fall and winter, and decreasing in spring and summer as growing plants absorb the gas through photosynthesis. The peak is reached every May, just before plant growth accelerates in the Northern Hemisphere. (The North has a larger effect than the Southern Hemisphere because there is much more land surface and vegetation in the North.)
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/climate/carbon-dioxide-record.html
Some of the figures and recently published research -
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
https://gml.noaa.gov/news/future_hfc_emissions.html
A cool animation of the levels over time (uploaded last fall) -
(fixed link)
hatrack
(59,587 posts).
LudwigPastorius
(9,155 posts)Goodbye coral. Goodbye clams. Goodbye mussels. Goodbye crabs. Goodbye phytoplankton.
roamer65
(36,745 posts)I wonder how far down the atmospheric O2 levels will be in 20-30 years.
Magoo48
(4,716 posts)Rising CO2 and lowering O2 is going to provide or next generations a dystopian world for which what remains of humanity will curse us for as long as any humans remain.
Bayard
(22,100 posts)roamer65
(36,745 posts)At that level, there will be a 20-25 percent cognitive decline.
thesquanderer
(11,990 posts)Last edited Fri Jun 3, 2022, 04:27 PM - Edit history (1)
...when there are daily mass shootings, and our democracy is teetering on the edge, and we can't beat covid, and women may not be able to get abortions, and Russia may start WWIII... By the time global warming really hits us, our country may already be unrecognizable. What's yet another disaster after I'm gone anyway?
And then we have whatever is going on in our personal lives as well. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm running out of bandwidth.
IronLionZion
(45,457 posts)not good for carbon dioxide levels. We should reverse it and plant more carbon capturing vegetation.
OldBaldy1701E
(5,134 posts)If ya can't get 1000% return on everything you do, don't do it! (At least that is sure what it looks like to me. There is so much these corporations could be doing and yet they won't interfere with that profit margin. So, don't expect anything to change any time soon. Of course, this is solely my uninformed opinion.)
IronLionZion
(45,457 posts)OldBaldy1701E
(5,134 posts)Because it is my opinion that even at the point mentioned in the quote there will be some who will not accept that the current socioeconomic system is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. Mostly those who hold the majority of the assets, which are only assets because everyone agrees they are. It is insanity. But, it is an accepted insanity. Which makes it okay to some. It makes my head hurt.
LT Barclay
(2,606 posts)different forests to detail 6 different ways we are destroying the forests. I still hope something will turn things around, but the book definitely made that hope seem really slim. Some days I look around me and I'm amazed that so many people just keep rolling on like nothing is going to happen. I get really down about the chances when I realize that we have to hope that we will get realistic environmental policy in a country where most people can't even stop littering.
hunter
(38,317 posts)... long before humans existed.
By the graph it may look like we are going to blow right past the Pliocene CO2 levels of 3.3 million years ago, maybe doubling what it is now and was then, but it's likely our civilization won't make it that far.
All the easy fossil fuels will have been taken.
It's rather difficult to extract even more fossil fuels with a sticks-and-stones technology and a human population measured in millions, not billions.
That kind of population crash wouldn't be pleasant...
I'm not a doomer, we have all the tools we need to climb out of this hole. We just have to apply them.
First of all we have to stop digging.
progree
(10,909 posts)Meaning where formerly there were 2 CO2 molecules, there are now 3 (on average)
Where formerly the earth had 2 blankets, it now has 3.
Kid Berwyn
(14,909 posts)And, thus, less O2 for brains.
Come to think of it, does explain a lot.