Ready for another milestone on our march to the “Global Warming Era” that Bill McKibben predicts this period of time will be called? Last Thursday, May 9th, we reached a daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 400 ppm. This milestone is 50 ppm over the safe zone of 350 ppm that scientists have said we need to maintain to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We first reached 400 ppm last summer but it didn’t stay there long. This is the first time that the daily average has crossed that line.
?It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,? said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.”
(Source: The New York Times)
“Carbon dioxide is the chief greenhouse gas?and stays in the atmosphere for 100 years. Some carbon dioxide is natural, mainly from decomposing dead plants and animals. Before the industrial age, levels were around 275 parts per million.
For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.” (Source: The Guardian)
We are already starting to see the effects of the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 2012 was the hottest year in U. S. history and the last decade has been the hottest, globally, in recorded history.
“‘The fact that it’s 400 is significant,” said Jim Butler, the global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Lab. “It’s just a reminder to everybody that we haven’t fixed this, and we’re still in trouble.'” (Source: The Guardian)
As the weather patterns continue to get worse, it will be the children who are most severely affected. Globally, 175 million children a year are affected by climate change?now and they will continue to be affected as they grow up. In fact, British teens are ‘deeply concerned‘ about the impact and want the government to do more to tackle the threat according to a new poll from UNICEF. The problem, according to Bryan Walsh, Senior Editor at Time, “is?that we tend to gawk at these temperature extremes, or at multibillion-dollar storms, then shrug and go back to our daily business. That shouldn’t be an option anymore.” I wholeheartedly agree. We can demand that our politicians and businesses do more to combat pollution but in the end it will be each of us deciding that it is more important to reduce our personal consumption that will change the outcome.
Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of climate change and calling on us all to make the changes needed now. Toward that end they have produced a movie called “Do the Math”. Here is the trailer.
