Carbon dioxide levels in April reached the highest level in human history and highest in hundreds of thousands of years, David Perlman reports for the
San Francisco Chronicle. Measurements by instruments on a mountain in Hawaii "showed that for the entire month of April, levels of the gas exceeded
400 parts per million for the first time, said Pieter Tans, a climate
scientist at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency who monitors
the instrument record."
(Chronicle graphic)
"The precise average for the entire month was 401.25 parts per million as
of Tuesday, he said, and that level had only reached the crucial 400
threshold for the first time during a single day a year ago before
dipping slightly," Perlman writes. "Records from ice cores drilled in Antarctica reveal air bubbles trapped
in the ice as long ago as 800,000 years ago and not one of those gas
bubbles has revealed carbon dioxide levels higher than 300 parts per
million, Tans said."
Mark Z . Jacobson, a
Stanford Univeristy atmospheric scientist and
environmental engineer, told Perlman, "The rise of carbon dioxide levels above 400 parts per million is an
indicator that the problem of global warming is getting worse, not
better. This means we need to focus more
heavily on solutions to this problem, namely converting to wind, water
and solar power for all purposes." (
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