Researchers have declared that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is presently at levels not seen for in any event 2.5 million years.
We can all presently claim part of the dubious honour of living in a time no other humans have ever experienced.
Carbon dioxide levels recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 415 parts per million (ppm) a week ago. This is more than 100 ppm higher than whenever in the 800,000 years of information researchers approach on world carbon dioxide concentrations. For point of view, the last time these levels hit 300ppm, humans didn’t exist.
Scientists say while the earth has gone through periods of cooling and warming before, these events have set aside an extremely long effort to happen. For almost a million years carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been, by and large, 280 ppm, not transcending 300 ppm or plunging beneath 160 ppm. Before, a dangerous atmospheric devation has happened bit by bit more than thousand-year periods, while the most recent human-caused warming event is occurring over only two or three centuries.
Johannes Feddema, professor and seat of climatology at UVic, says the rate of temperature change is alarming, however shockingly not startling. He says over the 18,000 years from the Ice Age to 1900, the rate of temperature change was 0.036. Amid the 100-year period from 1900 to 2000, the temperature change was 0.7 – a 20-crease increment. What’s more, worryingly, Feddema says over the last 20 years, “We have almost matched that 100-year record in increase, in CO2.”
Ice centers from the Antarctic ice sheet protect previews of how much ozone depleting gas was in the climate more than a huge number of years. Readings taken from them demonstrate a sensational increment in carbon dioxide levels toward the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
In the course of recent years, the dimension of CO2 in the atmosphere has ascended by a average of 2.5 ppm consistently, hitting 400 ppm in 2013.
“It’s unprecedented, as far as human history is concerned. We’ve never seen this before,” says Feddema.
“However, from a climate science point of view this is absolutely not unexpected. What is disconcerting is that despite all the discussions we’ve had, Paris, Copenhagen, etc. [United Nations climate talks], we’re not slowing down at all and we’re on a trajectory some call business as usual, but worse. We haven’t really made any dents about doing something about this.”
So why we aren’t we seeing cataclysmic impacts yet? Feddema makes a similarity linking the earth, shrouded in seas, to a pot of water boiling on a stove. It may require a significant stretch of time to get moving yet once it begins bubbling it is hard to stop, even after turning off the heat.
“We have a certain momentum going here that even if we manage to do everything right, things are going to continue to change for a while. And a while being in the order of a hundred years.”