It's all but official now: 400 ppm is the new normal.
“Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible,” Ralph Keeling, the scientist who runs the Scripps Institute for Oceanography’s carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post. “Brief excursions toward lower values are still possible, but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.”
We may get a day or two reprieve in the next month, similar to August when Tropical Storm Madeline blew by Hawaii and knocked carbon dioxide below 400 ppm for a day. But otherwise, we’re living in a 400 ppm world. Even if the world stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, what has already put in the atmosphere will linger for many decades to come.
“At best (in that scenario), one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn't change much — but would start to fall off in a decade or so,” Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s chief climate scientist, said in an email. “In my opinion, we won’t ever see a month below 400 ppm.”
CO2 levels above 400 ppm were first measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in 2013. Earth’s atmosphere had not previously reached that concentration of carbon dioxide in the last 4 million years.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Obvious Greatness of My Presidential Candidate:
I would like to take a moment to tell you all about why I favor my candidate for President of the United States. My candidate has made many statements on issues, has drafted many proposals for moving this nation forward, and has attended many locally significant gatherings. But none of that is particularly important, and it would be a waste of time to dwell on it. I would rather highlight the obvious greatness of my Democratic candidate by noting that your Democratic candidate is shamefully inferior. In fact, all the arguments for my candidate can be boiled down to the transparently obvious: my candidate is not your candidate, and your candidate, to put it bluntly, sucks.
For starters, your candidate is not electable. I cannot imagine your candidate getting elected to any office, even the office they were previously elected to, because they are so unelectable. In a world full of unelectable candidates, yours is the least electable of them all. If it were an election between your candidate, a sweater once worn by dog of the late Leona Helmsley, and a bowl of lukewarm soup, your candidate would still be the least electable of the three.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Our 1st order of biz: post-debate pointing & laughing. The Trump Foundation continues to generate scandal, and last week’s theories on self-dealing prove correct. LePage’s racist finger-pointing about drug dealers is undone. With photos.
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