The following report that was published this morning simply confirms all that I’ve been writing about recently. The atmosphere is rapidly being altered by our combustion of fossil fuels which is releasing CO2 and causing unprecedented weather events.
This revelation should focus our attention and efforts on an all out effort to initiate transition away from fossil fuel consumption to create power in a much more urgent and faster timeframe.
While there are steps we can personally take to affect this change, the biggest thing we can do is vote for climate champions and get everyone you know to do the same. We need to have all of our government officials working with us to support and incentivize transition in a much more concerted and speedy way.
Here’s the alarming news…
“CO2 levels measured over the past month at the Mauna Loa Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii topped 410 parts per million for the first time in recorded history…
April’s average of 410.31 parts per million marks a sharp increase since 2013, when CO2 levels surpassed 400 ppm for the first time. The current levels are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years”
“The new measurements come amid other recent troubling climate benchmarks. Earlier this week, Pakistan may have set a record high April temperature for anywhere on Earth of 122.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice cover in the Bering Sea is at a springtime low not seen since the middle of the 19th century. And the Chukchi Sea is now experiencing its earliest melt season on record.
Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have reached a record high, researchers announced yesterday.
CO2 levels measured over the past month at the Mauna Loa Baseline Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii topped 410 parts per million for the first time in recorded history, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
April’s average of 410.31 parts per million marks a sharp increase since 2013, when CO2 levels surpassed 400 ppm for the first time. The current levels are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years, according to Ralph Keeling, head of Scripps’ CO2 program.
The high number and steady rate of increase reflect humanity’s inability to control its fossil fuel consumption, he said.
“At some point we’ll be in territory that’s pretty difficult for lots of people, and we’re marching towards that with a steady pace that doesn’t bode well, so at some point we need to turn this around,” he said. “I would have hoped by now we would have seen some sort of break in the slope and some tendency for the growth rate to slow down as people recognize the problem and start taking measures to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, but the efforts so far, as significant as they are, don’t really constitute a big change of course yet.”
Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began recording CO2 levels at Mauna Loa in 1958; the data set is regarded as an underpinning of modern climate science. The elder Keeling developed the Keeling curve, which shows annual fluctuations in CO2 levels and links them to fossil fuel consumption. Carbon dioxide levels spike in the spring, before plant life re-emerges in a large swath of the world to begin the uptake of carbon dioxide. However, the rate of CO2 has steadily climbed since record keeping began 60 years ago, as have average global temperatures.
For about the last decade, CO2 has increased at about 2.5 parts per million annually, an unprecedented rate of growth, Ralph Keeling said.That rate of increase is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age, according to NOAA researchers.
The new measurements come amid other recent troubling climate benchmarks. Earlier this week, Pakistan may have set a record high April temperature for anywhere on Earth of 122.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice cover in the Bering Sea is at a springtime low not seen since the middle of the 19th century. And the Chukchi Sea is now experiencing its earliest melt season on record.
“We’ve fallen off a cliff,” National Weather Service climatologist Rick Thoman said on Twitter of the Bering Sea data.
