COVID-19 hasn t slowed global warming: Earth s carbon dioxide levels highest in over 3 million years, NOAA says msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
USA TODAY
Carbon dioxide and methane continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Human activity is driving climate change.
The world is already more than 2 [degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution.”
The COVID-19 pandemic did nothing to slow the root cause of global warming.
In fact, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth s atmosphere is now higher than it has been in at least 3.6 million years, federal scientists announced Wednesday.
At that time, sea levels were as much as 78 feet higher, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, Greenland was mostly green, and Antarctica had trees.
Atmospheric river to blast California with heavy rain, feet of snow Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Replay Video
First a drought, and now a deluge.
A powerful atmospheric river was headed for California on Tuesday, bringing the threat of torrential downpours that could unleash destructive debris flows from wildfire burn scars as well as a massive dump of snow in the Sierra Nevada. Even though precipitation is greatly needed across the drought-stricken state, the storm will bring too much all at once and lead to serious flooding concerns, AccuWeather meteorologist Jake Sojda said. The storm will start late Tuesday and could last into Thursday.
There is a great deal of confusion regarding how long carbon dioxide (CO
2) persists in the atmosphere. There are at least two reasons for this. The first reason is that there are multiple physical and biological processes that combine to remove CO
2 from the air and they behave differently and at different speeds. The second reason is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has changed how it describes the lifetime of CO
2 in the Summary for Policymakers twice over the course of four assessment reports. And since most politicians and media don’t dive deeper into the assessment reports than the summaries, some confusion is reasonable, if unfortunate.