Up, Up and Away! Scientists Anxious as CO2 Levels to Cross 400 PPM

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-30/up-up-and-away-scientists-anxious-as-co2-levels-to-cross-400-ppm.html



InsideClimateNews.org -- For the first time in human history, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are expected to pass 400 parts per million across much of the Northern Hemisphere in May, according to scientists who study data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, the world's longest-running CO2 monitoring station.

While crossing the 400 ppm mark isn't a "tipping point" that signals climate catastrophe, scientists told InsideClimate News, it is an important symbolic milestone that underscores government inaction on global warming.

"This is another global emissions target that we've blown past without doing anything," said Jim Butler, director of global monitoring at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. "Stronger storms, droughts, rising seas. We are already seeing the impacts of increased CO2 in the atmosphere... How much further can we really go?" The NOAA lab operates the Mauna Loa Observatory and dozens of other greenhouse gas monitoring sites across the globe.

The record level is expected to be the latest global warming milestone chronicled by the Mauna Loa Observatory, which was started by renowned climate scientist Dave Keeling in 1958. For 55 years, the station has taken hourly atmospheric CO2 readings from atop a Hawaiian volcano two miles up in the air.

[rightsideout]

1. This is bad news

I feel like knocking a denier upside the head with a tailpipe.

[GliderGuider]

2. We're at least 20 years late to the party.

I suspect that McKibben's intuition was right - that we tipped at 350. Now 450 is baked in the cake, and after that 500. Somewhere in there we get runaway methane emissions from the dissolving Arctic.

It's time to make peace with ourselves and our loved ones, and start getting our affairs in order. The grand story, the great dream, the promise of an infinite ascending future - it's over.