World Passes 400 PPM Carbon Dioxide Level Milestone;
Experts Say 'We're Stuck' With Global Warming

WASHINGTON - Associated Press, May 10, 2013

The old saying that "what goes up must come down" doesn't apply to carbon dioxide pollution in the air, which just hit an unnerving milestone.

The chief greenhouse gas was measured Thursday at 400ppm (parts per million) in Hawaii, a monitoring site that sets the world's benchmark. It's a symbolic mark that scientists and environmentalists have been anticipating for years.

While this week's number has garnered all sorts of attention, it is just a daily reading in the month when the chief greenhouse gas peaks in the Northern Hemisphere. It will be lower the rest of the year. This year will probably average around 396ppm. But not for long — the trend is going up and at faster and faster rates.

Within a decade the world will never see days — even in the cleanest of places on days in the fall when greenhouse gases are at their lowest — when the carbon measurement falls below 400ppm, said James Butler, director of global monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab in Boulder, Colo.

"The 400 level is a reminder that our emissions are not only continuing, but they're accelerating; that's a scary thing," Butler said Saturday. "We're stuck. We're going to keep going up."

Carbon dioxide stays in the air for a century, some of it into the thousands of years. And the world carbon dioxide pollution levels are accelerating yearly. Every second, the world's smokestacks and cars pump  2.4 million pounds of the heat-trapping gas into the air.  Carbon pollution levels that used to be normal for the 20th century are fast becoming history in the 21st century.

"It means we are essentially passing one in a whole series of points of no return," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said the momentum in carbon dioxide emissions has the world heading toward and passing 450ppm. That is the level which would essentially mean the world warms another 2 degrees centigrade, what scientists think of as dangerous, he said. That 2°C mark is what much of the world's nations have set as a goal to prevent.

"The direction we've seen is for blowing through the best benchmark for what's dangerous change," Oppenheimer said.

And to see what the future is, scientists look to the past.  The last time the worldwide carbon level probably hit 400ppm was about 2 million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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That was during the Pleistocene Era. "It was much warmer than it is today," Tans said. "There were forests in Greenland. Sea level was higher, between 10 and 20 meters (33 to 66 feet)."

Other scientists say it may have been 10 million years ago that Earth last encountered this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

Environmental activists, such as former Vice President Al Gore, seized on the milestone.

"This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years — and especially over the last several decades — we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization," Gore said in a statement. "We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate."

Carbon dioxide traps heat just like in a greenhouse. It accounts for three-quarters of the planet's heat-trapping gases. There are others, such as methane, which has a shorter life span but traps heat more effectively. Both trigger temperatures to rise over time, scientists say, which is causing sea levels to rise and some weather patterns to change.

When measurements of carbon dioxide were first taken in 1958, it measured 315ppm. Some scientists and environmental groups promote 350ppm as a safe level for CO2, but scientists acknowledge they don't really know what levels would stop the effects of global warming.

The level of carbon dioxide in the air is rising faster than in the past decades, despite international efforts by developed nations to curb it. On average the amount is growing by about 2ppm per year. That's 100 times faster than at the end of the Ice Age.

Back then, it took 7,000 years for carbon dioxide to reach 80ppm, Tans said. Because of the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, carbon dioxide levels have gone up by that amount in just 55 years.