Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Recent news regarding the health of Earth’s atmosphere is mixed, with reports that holes in the ozone layer are shrinking and could be eliminated by 2040 tempered by the fact that global CO2 emissions have now surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time ever.
First, the good news…
In a paper published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center report that regulation of ozone-depleting chemicals in the years following the passing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 has led to a decline in emissions of those substances.
As a result, the holes in the atmospheric layer are expected to be uniformly under eight million square miles (20 million square kilometers) within the next three decades, explained Engadget. The authors researched that conclusion based on analysis of data collected by the space agency’s AURA satellite, which reported levels of ozone-depleting chemicals each year.
Thanks to AURA’s findings, NASA said, “scientists can confidently say that the ozone hole will be consistently smaller than 8 million square miles by the year 2040.” They added that they plan to continue monitoring the recovery using the satellite’s data, and that they “hope to see its full recovery before the end of the century.”
And now, the bad news…
On the same day that NASA reported their findings regarding the ozone layer, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association revealed that the global monthly average of airborne CO2 had surpassed the 400 parts per million mark – just eight months after UN officials predicted that the planet would cross that threshold in roughly two years, according to Engadget.
“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone… This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120 parts per million since pre-industrial times. Half of that rise has occurred since 1980.”
Collecting data from 40 different locations worldwide, the organization reported that the average growth rate of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere from 2012 to 2014 was 2.25 ppm per year, the highest ever recorded over a period of three consecutive years. This also means that the planet is now 50 ppm past the UN’s established “safe limit” for atmospheric CO2 emissions.
James Butler, director of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division, seemed pessimistic in regards to the feasibility of reserving these trends. “Elimination of about 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions would essentially stop the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” he said, “but concentrations of carbon dioxide would not start decreasing until even further reductions are made, and then it would only do so slowly.”
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