The Earth’s atmosphere now contains millions, and possibly tens of millions of people, and perhaps tens of millions of people, of carbon dioxide, according to data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the University of California, San Diego.
For the first time, the global average concentration of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas released as a by-product of combustion fossil fuels, exceeded 430 copies (ppm) in May. The new measurements are record highs, representing an increase of over 3 ppm over last year.
Measurements show that the country is not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady accumulation of C02.
“Another year, another record,” said Ralph Keeling, professor of climate science, marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, California, in a statement. “i am sad.”
Carbon dioxide, like other greenhouse gases, can trap heat from the sun and remain in the atmosphere for centuries.
High concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global temperature and other negative consequences of climate change, including sea level rise, polar melting, and more frequent and severe extreme weather events.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen sharply since the pre-industrial era, mainly due to human activity that sends greenhouse gases into the air.
Decades ago, it was hard to imagine crossing the 400 ppm threshold. This meant that for every million gas molecules in the atmosphere, more than 400 were carbon dioxide. The planet hit its tough milestone in 2013. Currently, scientists are warning that CO2 levels could reach 500 ppm within 30 years.
However, human society is already in an unknown territory.
Keeling said that the planet likely had such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over 30 million years ago, at a time when climates were very different.
He said it was amazing, not just how much CO2 levels have climbed, but how fast they have climbed.
“It’s changing very quickly,” he told NBC News. “If humans had evolved in such a high CO2 world, there would probably be places we don’t live in now. We could have adapted to that world, but we have built society and civilization around the climate yesterday.”
Carbon dioxide levels are usually expressed in graphs known as keyring curves. It is a musical instrument at the top of the Maunaloa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958 and is named after Charles David Keeling, the father of Keeling, who began daily measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The Keyring curve famously shows the steepest climb since the Industrial Revolution due to the human-laminated climate change.
Ralph Keeling and his colleagues at the Scripps Oceangrup Institute discovered that the average concentration of atmospheric CO2 in May was 430.2 ppm. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Institute, which has been performing separate daily measurements since 1974, reported an average of 430.5 ppm in May.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are closely monitored to measure how many people are affecting the Earth’s climate. The measurements are also indicators of the planet’s overall health.
“They tell you about the health of the whole system with a single point measurement,” Keeling said. “We get the overall measurements of the atmosphere from a really kind of simple measurement set.”
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