CO2 levels pass 3-million-year record
Fossil fuel burning is pushing CO2 levels ever higher. Image: By Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons
The modern world is about to pass a temperature peak dating back for millions of years – because CO2 levels have already passed an ancient record..
LONDON, 8 April, 2019 – German scientists have confirmed, once again, that carbon dioxide is reaching concentrations unprecedented on any human time scale, with CO2 levels in the atmosphere already higher than they have been for at least three million years.
And their computer simulations – backed up by analysis of ocean sediments that tell a tale of changing temperatures and greenhouse gas levels – show that before the century’s close the world will become warmer than at any time in the last three million years.
The last time planetary temperatures reached a level higher than the target set by 195 nations in Paris in 2015was during a bygone geological period, the Pliocene.
“It seems we are now pushing our home planet beyond any climatic conditions experienced during the entire current geological period, the Quaternary,” said Matteo Willeit of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“Our results imply a strong sensitivity of the Earth system to relatively small changes in atmospheric CO2. As fascinating as this is, it is also worrying”
“A period that started almost three million years ago and saw human civilisation beginning only 11,000 years ago. So the modern change we see is big, really big, even by the standards of Earth history.”
He and colleagues report in the journal Science Advances that they made a numerical model of all the astronomical and geological data available for the last few million years and fed in algorithms to represent the physics and chemistry of planet Earth.
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