It is an historic and also frightening point in Man’s history. As former politician and environmentalist Al Gore put it in his blog, “for the first time in human history, concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary global warming pollutant, hit 400 parts per million in our planet’s atmosphere. This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years -and especially over the last several decades – we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization.”
Gore says we are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate. “Indeed, every single day we pour an additional 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the sky as if it were an open sewer. As the distinguished climate scientist Jim Hansen has calculated, the accumulated manmade global warming pollution in the atmosphere now traps enough extra heat energy each day to equal the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs exploding every single day. It’s a big planet — but that is a LOT of energy. And it is having a destructive effect.”
Only a few climate change skeptics believe our activities on Earth are having little or no real effect on the atmosphere and environment. The reality is that we are causing potentially catastrophic change.
As Robin McKie writes in the Guardian newspaper, carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents, which “will make hundreds of millions homeless.”
In the story, that is the stark warning of economist and climate change expert Lord Stern following the news last week that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere had reached a level of 400 parts per million (ppm).
Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, McKie writes.
The Anthropocene Era
