The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has reached 415 parts per million for the first time in human history, NBC News reports.
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii detected on Saturday that for every one million molecules of gas in the atmosphere, 415 molecules were carbon dioxide. The Earth has not seen carbon dioxide, which is known as a greenhouse gas because of how it traps heat from the sun, in the atmosphere on this level in three million years.
“We’re racing toward a state very different from the kind humans evolved in and that civilization developed in,” said geochemist Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s CO2 program, which oversees the Manua Loa Observatory.
Keeling noted that if the current rate continues, the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere could reach 500 ppm within the next 30 years, which could cause a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperatures.
“At the present pace, we could reach that well within a lot of people’s lifetimes,” Keeling said.
“Every year it goes up like this we should be saying ‘No, this shouldn’t be happening. It’s not normal,” he said in a statement, according to TIME magazine. “This increase is just not sustainable in terms of energy use and in terms of what we are doing to the planet.”
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