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Study: climate change risks a third of animals

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:41:00 +0000

According to a new report in the journal Nature Climate Change, flagged by Reuters, more than half of all plants, a third of animals are at risk to due to destruction of habitats as the climate changes. Last week scientists marked a symbolic but grim milestone -- carbon dioxide levels reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million, the highest concentration on Earth in millions of years. With the rise in global temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, the new study finds that many common animals and plants risk extinction:

CO2 levels pass feared milestone

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:51:00 +0000

In what climate scientists are calling a moment that "symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” carbon dioxide levels have reportedly reached a long-feared milestone. The New York Times reported that this concentration of the gas on Earth has not been seen for millions of years. Via the NYT:

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least 3 million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

Carbon pollution up to 2 million pounds per second

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:04:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The amount of heat-trapping pollution the world spewed rose again last year by 3 percent. So scientists say it's now unlikely that global warming can be limited to a couple degrees, which is an international goal.

The overwhelming majority of the increase was from China, the world's biggest carbon dioxide polluter. Of the planet's top 10 polluters, the United States and Germany were the only countries that reduced their carbon dioxide emissions.

Last year, all the world's nations combined pumped nearly 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, according to new international calculations on global emissions published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. That's about a billion tons more than the previous year.

The total amounts to more than 2.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide released into the air every second.

Because emissions of the key greenhouse gas have been rising steadily and most carbon stays in the air for a century, it is not just unlikely but "rather optimistic" to think that the world can limit future temperature increases to 2 degrees, said the study's lead author, Glen Peters at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway.