Warming gas levels hit 'troubling milestone'

[dipsydoodle]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The world's air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant.

Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn't quite a surprise, because it's been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.

So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon.

"The fact that it's 400 is significant," said Jim Butler, global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. "It's just a reminder to everybody that we haven't fixed this and we're still in trouble."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_CARBON_POLLUTION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-05-31-03-12-17

[Eddie Rek]

1. WE can still fix this!

Every one person can make a difference. Eat as local as possible. Eat as low on the food chain as much as you can. Fast and convenient food is killing the planet.

[chervilant]

2. No...

WE are killing OURSELVES. Our planet surely will recover.

[marmar]

3. I wish I shared your optimism, but the pathology of commerce won't allow it.....

...... Consumerist cultures have given no indication that they are willing to change, and no leaders appear brave enough to force the changes that are necessary.

[GliderGuider]

4. Unfortunately, we can't.

The CO2 is coming from every sector of human activity. Lowering it voluntarily would take an agreement by too many players to ever be feasible. The only way we'll stop emitting CO2 is if the global economy crashes. Even if it crashed completely and civilization dissolved, the world would keep warming for another several hundred years.

It's time we all thought deeply about responses other than "fixing it" because that choice isn't on the menu.

[Javaman]

5. Not to be a wet blanket...

Carbon is forever

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html

Carbon dioxide emissions and their associated warming could linger for millennia, according to some climate scientists. Mason Inman looks at why the fallout from burning fossil fuels could last far longer than expected.

After our fossil fuel blow-out, how long will the CO2 hangover last? And what about the global fever that comes along with it? These sound like simple questions, but the answers are complex — and not well understood or appreciated outside a small group of climate scientists. Popular books on climate change — even those written by scientists — if they mention the lifetime of CO2 at all, typically say it lasts "a century or more"1 or "more than a hundred years".

"That's complete nonsense," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. It doesn't help that the summaries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have confused the issue, allege Caldeira and colleagues in an upcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences2. Now he and a few other climate scientists are trying to spread the word that human-generated CO2, and the warming it brings, will linger far into the future — unless we take heroic measures to pull the gas out of the air.

University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer, who led the study with Caldeira and others, is credited with doing more than anyone to show how long CO2 from fossil fuels will last in the atmosphere. As he puts it in his new book The Long Thaw, "The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this"3.

more at link...

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Yes, we can fix this but we won't feel the effects in our lives, our children's lives and our grandchildrens lives.

[GliderGuider]

6. This is one of the reasons I'm pulling back.

With CO2 emissions we face with a situation of, "We won't stop and if we did it wouldn't help anyway."

This looks to be much the same in other areas of the ecological calamity as well - the water and soil depletion, the destruction of natural habitat and ensuing extinctions, the spreading pollution of various commons across the globe, the over-fishing, the trampling of genetic diversity and the mangling of the genomes themselves - none of it looks like it's controllable.

The same can be said of the spreading cultural blight - the growing income and power disparities, the financial and economic instabilities, the spreading disregard for human rights, the loss of the idea that a human life is intrinsically valuable, let alone the life of a non-human being.

Then there's the ever-growing human population, that is subject to divergent pressures - both from those who would see it increase even faster (or at least not slow down so their retirement funds will remain secure) and those well-meaning souls who would force fertility reductions on an otherwise unwilling populace, and in the process deprive them of the right to make their own decisions.

It's a mess. But what a glorious, fermenting, active turmoil of a mess! It's Life at its most raw and visible - warts, halos and all. We seem to be approaching some kind of a breaking/tipping/transition/transformation point beyond which all bets are off, all predictions vacated, all expectations set aside.

Collapse? Perhaps, but what might come after that point? We have no way of knowing whether it will be a descent to 50,000 barbarians with flint knives and a taste for human flesh or a new-agey "human ascension" to some quasi-divine state. The spectrum of possibility out past the approaching singularity is completely open, and our eventual path through that landscape is utterly unknowable. And anyone who tells you different is simply putting words to their own personal hopes and fears.

All we do know for sure is what is happening right now. We each get to make our own choice about what to believe regarding our future trajectory, and how to respond to the present conditions in light of those beliefs.

My choice is to let it all simply unfold as it will, and to celebrate the incredible transformative event that all of us - all 100+ billion humans who have ever lived - have cooperated to create. I have no wish to change a single thread in the tapestry. Rock on, world.

Hey, is it getting warm in here, or is it just me?

[Javaman]

8. What I have always found interesting is the concept of people stating that we...

"must save the world". The world will be just fine. What they are actually saying but don't want to come off as being selfish, is that "we must save the world for us".

I do what I can by my own set of morals and ethics, but I personally know people that get themselves into such a froth about saving the environment, but yet do nothing, continue motoring, contributing to their ever increasing carbon footprint and thinking, because they rave about the problems to the chorus they are doing something. I find that kind of energy exhausting and fascinating at the same time. So many people are caught up in the message but fail to read the story.

I have various people ask my advice, since I have a closed loop garden and try to reuse as much as I can, what should be done? I tell them, learn to live simply, better now then later when you are forced to.

My GF periodically asks me why I don't run for local office here in Austin. I don't because I don't want to live in a fish bowl. I love a peaceful life and running for office has less to do with passion for a cause than it does for a passion to hear one speak. LOL

It's not just you, it is getting a little warm in here.

Cheers.

[stuntcat]

9. "save the world" but NOT for us :(

I wish humans would go extinct, and the faster the better. What our species is doing to all the rest of the species on the planet is cosmically evil to me. Beautiful forests and beautiful seas, all either trashed or doomed now.

I know "save the world" sounds sillier all the time.. the argument that the earth will not perish is made so often. My heart breaks more every day about what's happening to the things that were beautiful. For the 40 more years I have to live, I will never be able to laugh at "save the world".
Sure someday the Earth will be clean and beautiful again, but the longer there are humans the longer it will take.

People wanting to 'save the world' for humans are totally The Problem.

[joshcryer]

13. It's going to be nasty.

We're going to ultimately resort to geoengineering, and I doubt very seriously that we're going to be able to get it just right. The ice caps will melt, that's just a foregone conclusion. We'll be having to deal with the issue from three prongs.

1) Massive 300k+ persons / year migrations out of sea zones that will be affected (you will have to start "early" to move all the people affected, many many people will push back and every year they don't move, there will be thousands more you have to move in the same time frame, eventually they'll get the picture, after enough floods).

2) Highly risky geoengineering which could actually turn the planet into a snowball earth or bring on an ice age if it is not done properly. A perpetually tinted yellow sky. The will of nation states to participate together since the sky / atmosphere is shared by all.

3) All the while you'll have to be doing these things with highly dwindling fossil resources which will impact the growth of society further, and which will shut down globalization in short order.

[NickB79]

10. The methane now being released from the Arctic says we can't

The Arctic ice cap will be gone by the end of this decade at current rates. Once it's gone, the methane releases we're already seeing will balloon as the open ocean waters absorb even more solar heat. Even without additional human inputs, the globe is now locked into positive feedback mechanisms that pretty much guarantee 3-4C warming by the end of the 21st century.

This rollercoaster just started down the rails, so we better hang on tight.

[Gregorian]

7. And not only is it going to remain at that level if we stop, but we aren't going to stop.

We're headed rapidly in the wrong direction.

Just look at how many monstrous jet engines are screaming 24 hours per day. I'm going on vacation. I'm going to Hawaii. I'm going to London. Travel is good for you. You haven't been there? You've got to go. For his graduation present I'm giving him a trip to...

Thousands of jets alone, in the air all of the time.

And little towns that used to be asleep are now a continuous sea of cars on the highway. All of the time.

Say goodbye. It's not going to end well.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Dozens of Corpocracy backed wars across the globe to grab dwindling resources,

which ironically are consuming much of the resources ( oil, gas, water) that they are trying to profit from.

the last man on earth will probably be someone like Donald Rumsfeld of Carlyle Group ilk,
holding the last gallon of oil and proclaiming " I won! It's mine!....alllll mine!"

[Gregorian]

12. Haha. That's a great picture I now have in my head.

I pity that person.

The wars. It's so true what you've said. I can't turn my perception. Even when I watch movies I look at all of the details of production, and the actual story to try and realize the energy that it took to accomplish. I just watched Tobacco Road, and there's a scene where an old farmer spends his first night in a hotel. He's so excited that there are electric lights. He says he's just going to stay up and watch that light. And my first thought is how rich we all are now. And how little we value what we have. People jumping on planes and flitting to any old place on the planet. I've joked to myself that at the gates of heaven the test will be based on how much fossil fuel one used. I've used my fair share. We all have. But I sure don't take it for granted. I cherish it. That makes it pretty damned hard for me to live in America. If I'm rambling, it's because I'm beat from bike riding today. I better put this computer down and go to bed. Good night!

[Rhiannon12866]

14. K&R! This needs to be at the top of The Greatest Page!