There are two worrying records that have been broken due to the shooting carbon levels this year.
In May, 2013, the carbon dioxide monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, recorded that the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had overtaken the symbolic "red line" of 400 parts per million. This was for the first time since the starting of record-keeping.
The second record that was broken this year was that for the first time in 4 million years, carbon dioxide levels at the South Pole shot through the threshold of 400 ppm.
And even this month, when the carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations should be at their nadir in the northern hemisphere, scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory have revealed that the levels of the greenhouse gas continued to be stuck above the 400 ppm.
This sure guarantees one unbeatable fact: that the monthly carbon dioxide levels is never going to fall below 400 ppm soon.
This is not just due to the El Nino effect, for human emissions shot up by 25% since the last El Niño in 1997 and 1998. "So, it's the natural effect on top of the increasing human effect," Professor Richard Betts of the UK's Met Office said.
"Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible. Over the past two decades, there were four years (2002, 2008, 2009, and 2012) in which the monthly value for October was lower than September. But in those years, the decrease from September to October was at most 0.45 ppm - which would not seem to be enough to push October values below 400 ppm this year," Ralph Keeling, the current program director of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography's carbon dioxide monitoring program, wrote in a blog post. "The monthly value for October will therefore almost certainly also stay above 400 ppm and probably will be higher than 401 ppm."
"At best, one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn't change much - but would start to fall off in a decade or so," Gavin Schmidt, NASA's chief climate scientist said via an email. "In my opinion, we won't ever see a month below 400 ppm."
Another study shows that the record can be extended to two million years in the past. It also predicts that the average temperatures might go up by about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) in the following millennia.
"This is not an exact prediction or a forecast," lead author Carolyn Snyder told Nature. "The experiment we as humans are doing is very different than what we saw in the past."
Hence, soon the pre-industrial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, about 280 parts per million, will soon get doubled. The rise in global temperatures cannot be kept below 2 degrees Celsius, even though the Paris climate treaty committed to it.
