Carbon Dioxide highest for 650,000 years
As reported in a BBC article, current levels of both Carbon Dioxide and Methane are the highest they’ve been in 650 millenia.
The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica) drilled 3¼km into an Antarctic region called Dome Concordia, retrieving samples which contain trapped air from the time the ice formed.
“One of the most important things is we can put current levels of carbon dioxide and methane into a long-term context,” said project leader Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“We find that CO2 is about 30% higher than at any time, and methane 130% higher than at any time; and the rates of increase are absolutely exceptional: for CO2, 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years.”
It is of course this last figure which is important, and it must make it hard for anyone to deny that Man’s current activities are having significant effect on the planet.
There will of course be some who will claim that even this steep rise is part of the ‘natural cycle’, but does this really mean we shouldn’t try and slow the increase?
We know that the planet is suffering, and we cannot deny that we have a considerable power over it.
So surely we should be working to preserve the place we inhabit.
When a building is falling down we can choose to either repair it or abandon it.
With the Earth, we only have the one option.