Researchers who spend their time monitoring the primary gas that is heating the planet have said that the largest-ever leap in the amount of carbon dioxide has just occurred. March’s global concentration was 4.7 ppm, which is a record-breaking increase in carbon dioxide levels over a year.
Scientists have blamed the El Nino climate event on the rise as well as the increasing amount of greenhouse gasses expelled into the atmosphere.
Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said, “It’s really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record. We aren’t just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising.”
The CO2 readings have been taken from the station on top of the Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii since the fifties. Every single year the results have increased, but last year’s reading was the largest jump that we’ve seen ever. The latest reading from the volcano sat at 426 ppm, which is the highest it’s been in millions of years and it’s over a fifty percent increase from pre-industrial times.
Before industrial times, the CO2 levels sat at 280 ppm for almost six thousand years before they began to increase rapidly. Keeling acknowledged this, saying, “The rate of rise will almost certainly come down, but it is still rising and in order to stabilize the climate, you need CO2 level to be falling.”
He continued, “Clearly, that isn’t happening. Human activity has caused CO2 to rocket upwards. It makes me sad more than anything. It’s sad what we are doing.”
