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This year’s Climate and Society class is out in the field (or lab or office) completing a summer internship or thesis. They’ll be documenting their experiences one blog post at a time. Read on to see what they’re up to.
By Tim Bushman, ’16
We are surrounded by numbers throughout our daily lives. Some, you’ll recognize easily.
24: the number of hours in one day. 365: the number of days in one year (except for leap years). $100: roughly the amount of money in my bank account at the moment.
But what about 406.95 parts per million (ppm)? If you’re not a climate geek, you’re probably not familiar with it, but you really should be since it’s an incredibly important number for our planet.
That was the recorded concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere measured by the Keeling Curve at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii on June 19, 2016. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that the measured CO2 concentration grew by a staggering 3.05 ppm during 2015, which was the largest annual increase in 56 years of record keeping and the fourth straight year that CO2 grew by more than 2 ppm. Climate Central recently reported that the CO2 levels in Antarctica hit 400 ppm for the first time in 4 million years. In fact, current CO2 levels are the highest they have been in at least the last 800,000 years. Yikes! We seem to be setting records for all the wrong reasons.
The article's full-text is available here.
