Earth's Atmosphere Hasn't Had This Much CO2 in Millions of Years (nbcnews.com) 134
Earth's atmosphere now has more carbon dioxide in it than it has in millions -- and possibly tens of millions -- of years, according to data released last month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the University of California San Diego. From a report: For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year.
The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming. "Another year, another record," Ralph Keeling, a professor of climate sciences, marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. "It's sad."
The measurements indicate that countries are not doing enough to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reverse the steady buildup of C02, which climate scientists point to as the main culprit for global warming. "Another year, another record," Ralph Keeling, a professor of climate sciences, marine chemistry and geochemistry at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. "It's sad."
S'all good (Score:4, Funny)
For the first time, global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, exceeded 430 parts per million (ppm) in May. The new readings were a record high and represented an increase of more than 3 ppm over last year.
That's okay, my folks the next town over said it was unusually cold over the weekend.
Re:S'all good (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does that make any of those things stated not true? What does this even mean?
Re: S'all good (Score:1)
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Needs about five such snaps.
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Too many humans, need a Thanos snap.
So many people looking for fewer humans, just so long as it is not them that are the victim of this culling.
If it is population decline you want then the USA could see that by restrictions on immigration. If every nation made an attempt at lowering population in their own way then that should make the "too many humans" crowd happy, no?
There's many developed nations around the world with below replacement birth rates but still seeing population growth from immigration. So, here's a suggestion, put an end t
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And stop greenfield development. No more building things on virgin land, from now on you have to infill on vacant lots or tear down an existing building to build a new one.
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Christianity also doesn't agree with birth control, maybe the new pope will change that, not that any of this is my fight
Huge majorities of sexually-active Catholics have used birth control (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/257670/why-do-so-many-catholics-use-artificial-contraception-experts-weigh-in).
In Jesus's time, the only true "birth control" was to not have sex. But, since nearly 50% of people at that time died before the age of 15, they needed huge numbers of births for the basic survival of the species. In addition, women were basically owned by their husbands (or fathers), and had limited opportunities to ea
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But the leaders of the Faiths, the pope, the imams, they set the doctrines, and
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So what's your solution? Are you also part of the problem?
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Killing half of every living thing means
You watched the wrong movie.
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It's better than an ice age.
Checked the news lately?
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Uh huh. Too bad you didn't pay attention to what I said.
Soo much winning! (Score:3)
Now we are _better_ than millions of years of humans were before! Oh, wait ...
The Big Beautiful Bill (Score:1)
How much does war contribute? (Score:2)
It surely is a major carbon dioxide contributor, but, it is also dumping a plethora of exotic materials into the atmosphere
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The non-C02 products tend to be heavy and fall to the ground quickly. It's the lighter stuff that sticks around.
May lower temperatures (Score:2)
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The amount of toxic clouds created by war is a metric I would like to know.
It surely is a major carbon dioxide contributor, but, it is also dumping a plethora of exotic materials into the atmosphere
All the particulate and CO2 released from all the oil wells purposely set on fire in the first Iraq war in Kuwait is a good example. Around 750 burned continuously and the last one took almost a year to get to with the average one gouting a column of flame for months. They needed to be explosively stopped from burning and sea water was pumped into them to stop the combustion. The scale of it was so bad it’s still not fully realized to this day and we have so many other examples no one thinks about t
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As it stands, if the "NATO 5%" was spent on climate change instead there would be no NATO any more and the argument would be moot.
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Why does it matter? Are people going to war going to say, "Oh, but it might hurt the environment, so I guess we shouldn't kill those other people over there." Or alternatively, if it turned out that war actually reduced the amount of environment pollution (it certainly does not,) would someone say "Hey, we need to go to war to save the planet!"
The answer is, the answer is irrelevant. Environmental impact has no bearing on anyone's decision about going to war, save perhaps for Global Thermonuclear War in
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By just killing so many Russians and kicking Russia's production back in the midle-ages.
We plants love it! (Score:3)
...so what if the humans die, they just screw things up. Good riddance!
-Robert Plant
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I love the sobering quote from Children Of Men.
In 50 years it's all gone
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Just 95%
Re:We plants love it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Plants may be happy to have CO2, but the resultant weather may not be so good for the plants.
Re:We plants love it! (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, just like humans love sugar, and the affects of a sugar or CO2 diet are similar between plants and humans.
We need healthy plants, not sickly spindly plants. That's why greenhouses boost all nutrients instead of just boosting CO2.
I'm sold (Score:2)
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500 means statistically significant health effect (Score:4, Interesting)
When CO2 gets above about 500ppm, you'll start to see statistically observable health effects in humans. People who are more susceptible to CO2 toxicity will feel drowsy, run-down, and complain that air quality is noticeably poor. At 1000ppm, about 50% of humans will begin showing these symptoms. At this rate, we'll see 1000ppm in the next century, and maybe faster as America tries so hard to make itself great again.
Re:500 means statistically significant health effe (Score:4, Informative)
And that's outside. Inside buildings with a lot of people breathing, CO2 levels will be higher.
Re: 500 means statistically significant health eff (Score:2)
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When CO2 gets above about 500ppm, you'll start to see statistically observable health effects in humans. People who are more susceptible to CO2 toxicity will feel drowsy, run-down, and complain that air quality is noticeably poor. At 1000ppm, about 50% of humans will begin showing these symptoms. At this rate, we'll see 1000ppm in the next century, and maybe faster as America tries so hard to make itself great again.
I get the feeling I’ll be forced to buy canned air.
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Don't be silly. If you wore a mask during covid as all the doctors said you must to flatten the curve, you were breathing 2000-5000ppm CO2 all day long.
Because the masks couldn't stop a virus but can stop a CO2 molecule?
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In a word: yes. (And no, I don't understand the mechanism here.)
The studies on both have been pretty conclusive. Masks have had zero measurable impact over baseline on viral infection rates in anecdotal studies, have been shown to significantly increase bacterial infections in the wearer, and they contribute to increased blood CO2 levels for the wearer. Rhetoric - yours or mine - aren't really factors here, it's merely what we've been able to prove scientifically.
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When CO2 gets above about 500ppm, you'll start to see statistically observable health effects in humans. People who are more susceptible to CO2 toxicity will feel drowsy, run-down, and complain that air quality is noticeably poor. At 1000ppm, about 50% of humans will begin showing these symptoms. At this rate, we'll see 1000ppm in the next century, and maybe faster as America tries so hard to make itself great again.
We already have bottled water, which wasn't a thing when I was kid. Bottled air is next.
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That's largely dependent on relative oxygen concentration in the air, which is the biggest reason indoor air quality is poor/low in oxygen - not CO2 directly. CO2 is the second order issue.
These are generally people with poor cardiovascular health in the first place.
With higher oxygen levels (as naturally happens with increased CO2) due to increased plant growth, people will/are able to withstand much more CO2 before its problematic.
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What makes you think there will be increased plant growth? Possibilities include,
1, populations of plants getting wiped out due to climate change. Plants don't migrate very quick.
2, increasing CO2 without increasing other nutrients results in sickly plants. That's why in greenhouses they add lots of 20-20-20 with micro-nutrients along with CO2 to increase healthy leave growth. Some crops like less nitrogen and higher potash and/or potassium, either way they need more nutrients along with CO2.
3, some types o
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"What makes you think there will be increased plant growth?"
Because it's literally what's happening throughout the world as we speak. Higher CO2 is leading to a regrowth of greenery, making deserts more habitable throughout North Africa.
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You also have to consider that the US has a long way to go before its even remotely competitive with China, if we're talking about total tons of CO2. They produce 2x what we do, and that's not including how much they breathe - which puts it more like 4-5x the total of what the US produces, for both India and China.
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I didn't get anything backwards, you misread and made an incorrect inference.
China has a lot more people. They also have a lower per-capita CO2 emittance but higher overall, because more people.
Because they have more people, they're also outputting (breathing out) more CO2. Thus how you get 4-5x total more. Because people breathe.
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That was literally the point I was making.
People breathe, and output CO2. There are more people in China, and thus, more CO2 production in aggregate (when you combine breathing + production).
What're you talking about?
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Defund the NOAA (Score:2)
That's the solution we'll get from the current administration.
Any suggestions on solutions? I have a few. (Score:2)
Another article on how bad global warming is getting. This is tiresome. I'd like to read more about solutions. Not just because talk of solutions gives us hope and optimism but also because I like machines. I like to read about megaprojects that will produce a lot of power, and do so with little to no CO2 emissions.
I like reading about new technology, not just computers and code but also new materials, new machines, new chemistry and physics. I expect that there's plenty of people that come to Slashdot
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If only we had a way to produce large amounts of reliable electricity without emitting significant CO2 over time. If we could do that electricity prices would fall and , people would want things like electric cars and electric home heating and could even justify a little more expense for efficient things like heat-pumps. Maybe someday our scientists will make such a breakthrough and our government will actually allow it within reasonable regulation. /sarcasm
Re: Any suggestions on solutions? I have a few. (Score:2)
How do they know? (Score:1)
Did they get some data about dinosaur farts from ancient deposits or something?
Re: How do they know? (Score:4, Informative)
Except... (Score:1)
...basically, the earth should be warmer.
The bulk of its history it's been a great deal warmer, with higher levels of CO2.
https://earthscience.stackexch... [stackexchange.com]
The fact is that that the deep carbon cycle is not at equilibrium, with more carbon coming out of the mantle (through volcanic activity) than carbon going back to the mantle (through subduction).
This is good, because at 150ppm CO2, vegetation fails and everything dies.
https://www.frontiersin.org/jo... [frontiersin.org]
"Should" (Score:2)
...basically, the earth should be warmer.
The word "should be" has no meaning in the context.
The bulk of its history it's been a great deal warmer, with higher levels of CO2.
For the majority of the history of the Earth it had no oxygen in its atmosphere. But nobody is saying "basically, the Earth should have no oxygen."
Heating Planet (Score:2)
Re: Heating Planet (Score:2)
Context is needed (Score:2)
Meanwhile, that's about half of the low end of what plants prefer - 800-1200ppm.
Their alarmism about (the 180ppm) of the last Ice Age, meanwhile, was almost low enough to kill all plantlife on the planet (and with it, most animal species that depend on said plants). We were dangerously close to global annihilation.
For context, 1000ppm is going to be a stuffy office space, and 800ppm a well ventilated indoor space.
A well-fitted surgical mask like so many medical professionals insisted was necessary some shor
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Because photosynthesis produces oxygen, and increased CO2 would lead to a higher oxygen production rate. It's pretty basic science that one learns in middle school.
I picked 25% arbitrarily, it could be higher or only marginally lower, and presumably it'd take a great deal of time for the entire planet's oxygen levels to stabilize to newer CO2 levels.
Just referring to the headline (Score:2)
That headline has been true for the last fifty years. "News"? More like "olds".
Re:Panic! Run around with head on fire! B'GAWK! (Score:5, Informative)
The sad irony is that with no hope of reproduction, this organism would kill us all rather than persist.
And I say no hope of reproduction because anyone with kids would understand the value in following long term trends.
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We are falling into a pit that is being dug out faster than we can fall and we are just reaching the depth that the pit reached in the 1950s (+2C). In another 100 years humans will experience the full impact of today's CO2 concentrations if we just stop increasing the levels today. This data is telling us how much farther we have to fall and is not a reflection of the temperatures we are seeing today.
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CO2 cannot be the only indicator. In the last million years, despite lower rates of CO2 in the atmosphere, there have been multiple periods of higher average temperatures than we have today, and multiple ice ages.
Sure, there's orbital changes. Did you know that the distance to the Sun varies by 5 million miles a year. End of December currently the Earth is 5 million miles closer then at the end of July. Currently this correspond to warmer winters and cooler summers in the northern hemisphere where the majority of land is. Over 10's of thousands of years, both the maximum/minimum distance changes as well as the Earth's seasons change. This is a cause of varying climate over 10-100 thousand year scales.
What we are doi
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Foxoids just cherry-pick the few wrongbies from the past, and statistical flunkies like YOU fall for it. Grow a brain!
Re:Panic! Run around with head on fire! B'GAWK! (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not a difficult concept. Here is a handy graphic showing the rate of change. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com] Here is the source for the data. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi... [explainxkcd.com]
Re:So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:5, Insightful)
>clearly the Earth can have and can survive these high levels
As if it was ever a question of the survival of the Earth? You gotta start with a straw man so that it takes time to knock this shit down.
> modern mammalian life was around millions of years ago, and they all did just fine.
modern mammalian life... My dude, mammals have been around since the Triassic. It's not a question of what life will survive, it's about the mass-catastrophe for our society and human life.
What is with these nihilists? Why can't you just be honest? If you don't care what happens to human society, that's your prerogative, but why make up stupid straw men to argue against? Just hold your position for what it is.
Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:5, Insightful)
Thatâ(TM)s great. But in case youâ(TM)re not joking, Less than 1,000 people have ever gone into space and all of them simply come back when theyâ(TM)re done in months. We have forgotten how to land things on the moon, and in fact when we were good at it, we only managed to land two people six times for three days or less. Mars? Only one person wants to live there. Fine. Let him. Moving to currently uninhabited places on earth means recreating nearly all of the infrastructure of all the existing cities. Good luck with that. In the US it took 250 years to create the current infrastructure. Generously 100 years for the current generation. How about maybe we just cut back on some things? Never mind that the people who are A-Ok with the cause of the pollution have a conniption every time they see the bill for a federal space flight.
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Mars? Only one person wants to live there.
I'm quite certain that there's more than one willing to make that trip. Even if it is one way. They'd happily die there, so long as it is from old age than on impact.
How about maybe we just cut back on some things?
How about we don't do that? Instead we can build the infrastructures needed to adapt to global warming while also building new energy production and manufacturing processes to reduce CO2 emissions. I've seen plenty of ideas on how to do that, and the obstacles are mostly political.
I expect to see CO2 emissions drop in the future. Not becau
Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:2)
Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:4, Insightful)
Mars? Only one person wants to live there. Fine. Let him.
To be fair, there's lots of people who are, shall we say, fanatically enthusiastic about the chance to live on Mars. More than we'll ever have rockets for.
Not that we have rockets for them. Not that they could pay for them if we did. Nor would there be anything for them to do on Mars other than sit in their little habitat that's like a jail cell, except with no chance of escape, no visitors, no outside time, no medical care, and a real chance of death if any one of the machines keeping you alive fails.
Re:So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:5, Insightful)
If we could "fix" the moon or Mars, then we could fix the Earth easily. Moon/Mars colonization is insanely harder than dealing with even the harshest likely Earth climate changes.
With a more energetic atmosphere, who *knows* what the weather patterns will be, what crops will be feasible, and how much plant life and animal life we can cultivate for food. There is some non-zero chance it somehow pans out with less drama than feared, but significant chance that humanity will suffer starvation and violence that dramatically harms our population. Seems like a bet we shouldn't be taking if we can help it.
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If we could "fix" the moon or Mars, then we could fix the Earth easily.
Your point is valid but your logic is not. Creating something from scratch is FAR easier than fixing a complex balanced system. That is why we make babies and die. Reproduction is an easier problem to solve than long term maintenance.
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Exploration may be worthwhile, but it is a totally separate thing and won't provide relief for climate issues. The only possible way it could help anyone on that front is that the select few that go are hard for the desperate starving people to follow. But you'd never be able to build a civilization at any scale there without also figuring out ways to make Earth way better. Any habitat you make that can survive on Mars you could make on Earth, any CO2 scrubbing you can do in a small environment you can also
Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:2)
Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:2)
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we can also migrate to the moon or Mars and bring some of those other species with us
Astonishing. You're proposing MOVING TO A DIFFERENT PLANET that cannot support literally ANY FORM OF LIFE without a massive support infrastructure instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, moving away from burning fossil fuels, and making a few other relatively simple changes to keep the earth habitable for human civilization.
This sort of stupidity would be unbelievable if it wasn't parroted so often by clueless and/or paid-for oligarch mouthpieces.
Re:So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. The only different was the change happened over millennia. We're looking at 1.5 centuries.
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There's no right to nice weather, and people just need to get un-spoiled by air conditioning.
Then that's bad news for those advocating for use of heat pumps to lower CO2 emissions. Every heat pump is an air conditioner with a "reverse gear".
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At least in houses with decent or good isolation.
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Us humans? Not so much
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1000 is too high. Good level for the human is 400-800.
So if you are in a room full of people, you want to remain under 800. It can be achieved with simple ventilation, as long as the outside air has much less than 800 ppm. If the outside air is at 1000 ppm, it gets very expensive to keep it under 800 inside in a room full of people.
Even if you ignore deserts and global warming, anything above 500-600 ppm, I think, will start being problematic for buildings and mass transit ventilation.
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The problem is not how the Earth handles high CO2 levels, it's the disruptions to modern civilization and how various nations react to them. Almost every war in history has been caused by some level of too much population for the resources in an area, and rapid changes to the availability of resources is not going to be good for political stability.
Re:This is a non-story (Score:5, Informative)
You do know we have data on CO2 levels going back millions of years right? It hasn't increased this fast this high since humans have been around. In fact it was relatively stable until about 100 years ago.
1000 AD - 280 ppm
1100 AD - 282
1200 AD - 284
1300 AD - 283
1400 AD - 281
1500 AD - 282
1600 AD - 277
1700 AD - 277
1800 AD - 283
1850 AD - 285
1900 AD - 295
1950 AD - 310
1975 AD - 330
1990 AD - 355
2000 AD - 368
2010 AD - 387
2020 AD - 412
2024 AD - 422
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literally google "CO2 ppm [year]" and you'll find dozens of citations.
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An indicator of catastrophic future damage isn't newsworthy....to fools.
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I am not. I see you are a fool.
Good day.
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Except... basically all the warming already is done. Further increases in CO2 basically don't contribute to warming.
Incorrect.
Warming is proportional to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration. This is the Arrhenius relationship; it's been know for over a century. (For reference, this is why climate sensitivity is expressed as degrees of warming per doubling.)
You could say that "that means that as CO2 increases the slope levels out", which is true, but we are still in the linear range.
#followthescience https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.030... [arxiv.org]
An interesting paper (although not peer reviewed), basically re-doing Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 calculations but with updated
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From your link "the surface warming increases signicantly for the case of water feedback assuming xed relative humidity"
it literally explains the "Feedback Loop" that's the problem. CO2 causes some warming, which causes more H20 vapor to be released, which causes far more warming...and repeat.
a given CO2 concentration will obviously reach a heat/radiative equilibrium - but it's not acting alone.
Also, Venus would like a word.
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The increase is not linear. That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function.
CO2 levels increased from ~260ppm to ~275ppm in around 10,000 years.
300, 350, 400 being hit in 100 years? That's relevant.
nonlinear [Re:This is a non-story] (Score:2)
Not sure I agree. The increase is not linear. That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function.
There is a little curvature visible in the measured carbon dioxide rise [ucsd.edu], but it's the steadiness of the rise, not the slight curvature in the rise, that is the reason it hit 425 ppm.
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You're really saying that deviations from linearity that happened fifty years ago are the reason that this story is news today?
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The exponential curve is defined by the constant growth of the output. It is nonsensical to say "the linear component..." when growth is universally positive.
1) There is no linear component. The curve is exponential. GHG growth is not in a fixed number of Gt per year, it's in a percentage of the whole.
2) Nobody ever claimed that the doubling period was 10 years, or some shit, but this is really just more finger waggi
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We seem to be talking about completely different things. Let me see if I can state what I said more clearly. My comment had been that there is nothing new about this "news" story. Your reply was "Not sure I agree. The increase is not linear."
The fact that the increase is not linear is not relevant to the fact that there is nothing new.
You continued "That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function."
Nope. The "milestone" 430 ppm gives you no information whatsoever about "the ex
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Nope. The "milestone" 430 ppm gives you no information whatsoever about "the exponent of the function".
Wrong. Because the milestone is not a data point that is divorced from any other data points. They also, importantly, have a timestamp.
y=n^.... now what goes here, again?
This story is not news. The fact that the curve is exponential does not make it news.
The fact that it is, is not.
The current value of that exponent very much is, which can be derived, or estimated using periodic updates.
You're wrong on this at both the mathematical level, and really just in principle, and you've been moderated accordingly.
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I can only repeat that nothing you said makes this a story that couldn't have been equally well reported in 2024, or 2014, or for that matter in 1974.
This is not news.
Re:This is a non-story (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe you're a good scientist/technical type, but you obviously don't know a lot about human cognitive processes and learning. The name of the game is repetition. Over and over and over. Especially for something like AGW, which is a) a major threat but b) the changes come on slowly but c) if we don't do anything about it in advance, we'll be in a world of hurt, but only at a later date and d) the changes we need to make are fairly significant. For something like that, there needs to be literally decades of constant discussion in order to convince enough people to bite the bullet. Heck, 30 years of constant discussion hasn't been enough for any meaningful change. At this point, I'm actually pretty cynical. I'm not convinced that 30 more will even be enough.
We'll make changes when the consequences of emissions hit us in the face like a brick. Probably not before.
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Maybe you're a good scientist/technical type, but you obviously don't know a lot about human cognitive processes and learning.
I know too much about human cognitive processes and learning. I know that humans get desensitized to information they hear over and over, and eventually just filter it out.
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A great deal of education is based on repetition/practice as well.
People might *think* they're filtering it out, but it gets in there.