It’s been known for a while that us humans are causing climate change, the increasing frequency of devastating extreme weather events and unprecedented rate of extinctions should have been a dead giveaway, so it’s pretty funny to think there are still climate change deniers out there.
Unlike the lyrics from a particular rock ballad in the title, these words come with particularly bad news. On the 3rd of April 2021 the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii measured the highest concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in recorded history, the passing of 420 ppm (parts per million) marks the halfway point to doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since before the industrial revolution.
This is unsettling news because doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2, predicted to occur by 2030, is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 2.6°C, raising it up to 4.1°C above preindustrial temperatures. You may be asking yourself “but it won’t really affect me in my lifetime, will it?”, the reality is things are getting worse at an exponential rate if humans don’t take action to mitigate our contribution to climate change. The harsh truth is that reaching this milestone of being halfway to doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is an omen of an approaching shitstorm of problems for me, you and generations to come.
