Levels of CO2 are pushing beyond 400 parts per million in the atmosphere. The last time they were there, 15 million years ago, the world was very different place.

Humans weren't around in the Evolutionary Scheme of Things. All Biological Life in Earth's Historical past have been time consumingly woven into the Fabric of Evolutionary Life support systems. Having such an abrupt peak or spike in Carbon Concentrations in a short period of time, species cannot adapt quick enough to the sudden changes and are destined to ultimate Extinction.

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We’ve blown past another unpleasant climate milestone on behalf of our planet. At the end of September, the planet is supposed to be at a yearly low point in atmospheric CO2 concentrations after a summer of green leafy things sucking up the CO2 and breathing out oxygen. (Most of the people and most of the plants are in the Northern Hemisphere, which means our summer is basically the one that matters. Sorry, everyone else.) But this year, the entire planet has hovered above 400 ppm of CO2 with no indication that we’ll for some reason experience a precipitous drop. It’s not because we’re running out of trees. It’s because we’re putting more and more carbon dioxide in the air.

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But it’s about more than absolute CO2 levels. It’s about area under the curve. Carbon emitted today stays in the atmosphere for decades. New research accounting for this year’s El Niño and its impact on CO2 concentrations just came out, and it predicts that humans will probably not see an atmosphere that has less than 400 ppm of CO2 again, at least within our lifetimes. Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography thinks the change is permanent: that we’ll never see atmospheric CO2 again, ever.

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 When was the last time the planet had CO2 levels like this, and what sort of a world was it?

Dr David Etheridge, a principal research scientist at Australia’s CSIRO, told me: “We know [levels of CO2 in the atmosphere] from the air extracted directly from ice cores and we can go back to about 800,000 years ago. It is inconceivable that there would be any lasting concentration of CO2 much above about 300 parts per million in that record.”

He says analysis of sea sediments can push our estimates of historic CO2 levels back even further – to about two million years. Those records also show today’s levels of CO2 are higher.

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“That’s a pretty solid record,” he says. “But climate change is about the rate of change. This is all coming at us very quickly and the increases are faster than anything we have seen in history. That’s a big issue.”

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Etheridge says it is vital that monitoring of atmospheric CO2 continues because those measurements are plugged into computer models of the climate system.

The measurements, he says, help scientists understand how the oceans and the land are reacting to the pulse of carbon dioxide we’re responsible for since the start of the industrial revolution.

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Once you melt an ice sheet, it takes many, many thousands of years to rebuild it

Another point to make, is that the reason that CO2 levels keep rising in the atmosphere is because once it’s there, it stays there for a long time (think of it this way: if your dad drove your mum to the hospital the day you were born, the CO2 released from the tailpipe helped push CO2 levels to where they are today, whether you’re aged 21, 40 or 100).

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Those CO2 levels are pushing global temperatures beyond any point that human civilisation has ever experienced before.

It is not just the levels of CO2, but the speed at which we’ve managed to get them there.

Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University in the US says there is no evidence in the ancient climate record “for the rapidity of the current human-caused release of CO2”.

 

Biological Evolution is primarily a time based process where adaptation influences the Genetic Building Blocks of all Species allowing them to adapt to the Natural Changes in their Environment. Sudden changes brought about by Humanity's Industrial Revolution can only equate to Genocide of all Species. Disruption of their comfort zones by limiting their adaptability to the quickly changing Environment. 

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