The Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced June 3 that carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii hit an all-time high at 421 parts per million in May.
According to an NOAA news release, these levels of carbon dioxide have not existed in millions of years.
NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography made the announcement.
“The science is irrefutable, humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, according to the release. “We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day.”
The NOAA’s May measurement of 420.99 parts per million (ppm) is a 1.8 ppm increase over 2021 with a 420.78 ppm monthly average, according to the release.
“The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more climate ready nation,” Spinrad said.
“Carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before," said Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory, according to the release. “This is not new. We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it. When are we going to do anything meaningful about it?”
According to the release, before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels steadily hovered at 280 ppm for approximately 6,000 years of human civilization. Ever since, humans have created an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 pollution which will continue to warm the atmosphere for an additional thousands of years.
According to the release, CO2 pollution is created by fossil fuel burning for transportation and electrical generation. This is carried out through cement manufacturing, deforestation, agriculture and several other practices.
The release states that impacts to the oceans from greenhouse gas pollution include sea surface temperature upticks, rising sea levels and increased carbon absorption. This makes sea water “more acidic, leads to ocean deoxygenation, and makes it more difficult for some marine organisms to survive,” the release reads.
