David Biello, of the Scientific American, reports that The Earth climate has changed. After nearly two centuries of fossil fuel-burning, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have reached 400 parts per million, especially boosted by the seemingly ever-accelerating amount of combustion in the last few decades according to the World Meteorological Organization. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 0.04% may not seem like much but it is enough to have already raised average global temperatures by a full degree Celsius, according to the U.K. Met Office, with more warming on the way as the greenhouse gas lingers invisibly in the atmosphere, trapping heat, or mixing into the ocean, rendering its waters more acidic.
In fact, the world has not seen CO2 concentrations this high in at least hundreds of thousands of years. Roughly 35 billion metric tons of CO2 are spewed into the atmosphere annually ... and rising. The waters of the global ocean have become 30% more acidic in the last few decades and the world has not been this warm in thousands of years. This year is likely to be the hottest one since record keeping began, thanks to an El Nino weather pattern that is forming up in addition to global warming. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1998, which was the year of the last major El Nino.
Worse, farming, forest-clearing and other activities have contributed to emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, the latter more commonly known as laughing gas, which is no laughing matter in the atmosphere.
Yet there are signs of hope as well. The U.S. is burning less coal ... Europe, and even China have begun to use less of this dirtiest of fossil fuels. And although India and the rest of Asia are building hundreds of coal-fired power plants, there are also plans for more electricity derived from nuclear power plants and from solar in India, wind in China and hot rocks in Indonesia....all to some extent at least.
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