Meteor Blades brought this up in an open thread column yesterday, but I think it's important enough to deserve some additional attention.
According to a scripps oceanography chart, the observatory at Mauna Loa just registered 400 PPM (parts per million) of CO2 in record time, and broke 402 PPM for the first time.
And here's the weekly numbers from
NOAA's Mauna Loa observatory
Week beginning on March 30, 2014: 400.55 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 398.17 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 379.67 ppm
Last updated: April 10, 2014
come inside my friend to the show that never ends; more below the fold.
Congratulations! You are now witnessing something that no other civilized person, and possibly no other human being has ever witnessed, A CO2 level beyond 400 PPM. According to an article by Andrew Freedman ;
While studies show conflicting dates for when Earth's atmosphere last had carbon dioxide levels this high, estimates range from 800,000 years ago to 15 million years ago.
And he's got this very nice chart.
That's the real long stuff, so let's take a look at how we're doing in the shorter term. According to the denialists, we've peaked out for Global Warming because we haven't broken a global temperature record in awhile. Well surely that's going to show up in the CO2 data;
Hmmm, don't see much of a pause in this chart. Maybe we ought to look at a longer term chart.
Update: And Pajoly deserves a rec in the comments below for clarifying;
The bump up and down of the line reflects seasonal changes in the absorption of CO2 by plant life, which is highest in the late spring and lowest on the other side of the year.
Now if you understand that CO2 traps heat, and there is no "believing" because it's one of those science fact thingy's that high school science classes do as an experiment, then you see there's a bit of a mystery of where the heat is going. Now this is the way science works. As questions arise, you systematically start collecting data and propose possible conclusions. As the data supports one hypotheses or another, you start following the data toward those hypotheses and put less emphasis on the ones that aren't supported by the data. You don't just pull something out of your butt and say, disprove this! And then do it again and again and again, like the pseudoscience denialists do.
For some reason, denialists and their conservative political allies just love the past. These Climate terrorists are doing something that many scientists say isn't possible, time travel. They use 12th century reasoning to deny reality, and in the process, they are pushing our climate further and further into the past.
There's an election coming up and there will be many denialists on the ballot. Our children will someday ask us, what did we do to stop them?