One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.
“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.”
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch,” NOAA said, “when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.”
I think the only thing that’s going to save us from climate change is another ice age.
And we and our children, and all of our grandchildren, and great great grandchildren, will be long dead by then.
That’s true.
I mean more like, the only way I suspect we’ll get back to pre industrial levels of co2 is with another ice age. Because I doubt civilization as we know it is going to survive long enough to fix it.
This one is a much better explanation and unfortunately i tend to agree with you here that humanity will not solve this in time.
… unless, maybe, we apply drastic geo - engineering methods that would solve only part of the problem.
And so, i expect a sharp decrease in humanity’s population over the next few decades.
i don’t know if it works like that. if you take a petri dish and put bacteria in it with an unlimited amount of glucose (a proxy for oil), colony collapse happens because of pollution
but the pollution doesn’t go away later and the population doesn’t come back to pre-collapse levels ever
Bold of you to assume we aren’t largely sterile as a species by the time the current generation has great grandchildren.
I’m actually not assuming but forgetting.
Because the only thing that scares me more than climate change is microplastics. And I don’t often have the spoons to let myself think about it.
Luckily, the fossil fuel companies told us it isn’t anthropogenic and not to worry about this so we will be okay. /s
They’re also gunning for precedent of immunity from repercussions of wrongdoing through SCOTUS as we speak.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/fossil-fuel-allies-pressuring-supreme-court
I mean, that’s great and all, but you can’t reappropriate corporate funds with pitchforks.
We need punitive rulings and legislation.
I’ve also been told that despite emitting close to a third of the world’s over all emissions, China produces less per capita than some developed countries so climate change is giving them a pass.
So that’s a third taken care of right there!
That’s the scapegoat argument from US industry and politicians. The only reason the US is second to China in carbon emissions is because of the excessive outsourcing of US manufacturing to China.
The US is responsible for the most carbon emissions worldwide.
Who controls the manufacturing processes in China? Who accepts the manufacturing contracts? Who controls their energy grid?
Americans gonna drag the whole world into hell with them.
Yep. China’s leaving us so far behind in green investment that America’s banning theyre EVs because theyre so affordable they put our ICE SUV sales at risk.
Moving to EVs is great, all countries are following similar trends and it is a good step in the right direction, but China has a long way to go before becoming a bastion of ecological absolution. Shanghai’s fog of pollution is something everyone should experience.
Remember china has the second largest population on the planet, cumulative metrics are useful but miss the bigger per capita picture. Check out the wikipedia article on ev usage and note the per capita numbers
My first guess on the title was : “this should be caused by a positive feedback with forest fires in the loop”.
…so, I went and read this Wikipedia article :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedbacks
… and it says :
(…) Carbon cycle uncertainty is driven by the large rates at which CO2 is both absorbed into plants and released when biomass burns or decays. For instance, permafrost thaw produces both CO2 and methane emissions, in ways that are difficult to model. (…)
But it also says that this one is not the most important feedback loop.
