File:Changes in carbon dioxide per 1000 years - via Climate Central.jpg

Capital Weather Gang

Perspective from the Washington Post

The Carbon Skyscraper

By Benjamin Strauss

2021

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/12/carbon-skyscraper-rapid-climate-change/

Steepness is what shows the speed of carbon dioxide increase — and speed foretells danger. The faster the climate changes, the less the ability of society, along with the ecosystems we depend on, to adapt to the new abnormal.

... it’s critical to understand how quickly human activity will drive the climate to change, compared with past rates. Will we cause gradual shifts that civilization and life on Earth can adapt to — or are we igniting a wildfire that can’t be outrun?

And so it is that scientists trek to frigid Antarctica, to drill deep into its ice sheets and pull out thousands of feet of snow compressed into ice. They carefully date each layer, extract tiny bubbles of ancient atmosphere and measure the concentration of carbon dioxide, tuner of the planet’s thermostat.

From this hard work, we’ve learned the saw-toothed pattern of carbon dioxide levels over the past 1 million years. It has shot swiftly up during climbs to past warm intervals, a bit like the climate of today, and ramped slowly down into the long ice ages in between. We can also see the sharp recent increase in carbon dioxide that humans have caused, mainly by burning fossil fuels for energy. The graph used to show this jump is arguably the most iconic figure in climate science.

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