One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.

“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.

  • treefrog@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I think the only thing that’s going to save us from climate change is another ice age.

    And we and our children, and all of our grandchildren, and great great grandchildren, will be long dead by then.

      • treefrog@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        That’s true.

        I mean more like, the only way I suspect we’ll get back to pre industrial levels of co2 is with another ice age. Because I doubt civilization as we know it is going to survive long enough to fix it.

        • A_A@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          This one is a much better explanation and unfortunately i tend to agree with you here that humanity will not solve this in time.
          … unless, maybe, we apply drastic geo - engineering methods that would solve only part of the problem.
          And so, i expect a sharp decrease in humanity’s population over the next few decades.

          • treefrog@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            And unfortunately most of that population reduction is going to be people that were not even hooked on fossil fuels to begin with.

            As well as all of the other innocent life on this planet that is suffering right now and will continue to suffer.

        • secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          i don’t know if it works like that. if you take a petri dish and put bacteria in it with an unlimited amount of glucose (a proxy for oil), colony collapse happens because of pollution

          but the pollution doesn’t go away later and the population doesn’t come back to pre-collapse levels ever

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      Bold of you to assume we aren’t largely sterile as a species by the time the current generation has great grandchildren.

      • treefrog@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        I’m actually not assuming but forgetting.

        Because the only thing that scares me more than climate change is microplastics. And I don’t often have the spoons to let myself think about it.