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May 5, 2009 by cshells58
Filed under Featured

That is the current level of CO2 in the arctic atmosphere.
Early last year, James Hansen from NASA told us all that we had to be at 350. Pre-industrial levels were 280. What are we doing wrong? And, when are people going to figure this out.

“It is not the level of CO₂ that is the problem, because the earth will adapt. What is very worrying is the speed of change. Levels [here] are now increasing 2-3ppm a year.

“The rate of increase is much faster than only 10-20 years ago. You can almost see the changes taking place. Never before have CO₂ levels increased so fast,” he said.

The global annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 it has risen to an average 2.1ppm.

I think this is an important time to bring up rates of evolution as compared to rates of environmental change.

The Industrial Revolution started int he late 1800′s, really taking off in the early 1900′s. So let’s say.. and to be generous… 150 years? It has taken us 150 years to increase the CO2 in our atmosphere by 100+ppm.

With that change, we have seen ice caps melting, animal extinction, sea level rising, increased temperature, drought, snow storms… essentially a complete destabilization of the climate.

In contrast… DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated 200,000 years ago. We diverged from Homo sapiens neanderthalensis approximately 500,000 years ago. What I am trying to clarify is that human evolution occurs over multiple reproductive generations. For a genetic mutation to be expressed in a population to show a complete adaptation to an environmental change takes thousands of years. Tens of thousands of years.

Why would an intelligent Homo sapien sapien…. you or even your child… think that we could easily adapt to the changes of the planet? The quote above is accurate… “the earth will adapt”. The probability that modern humans and this society will continue is actually quite low. Quite low.