Alister Doyle in Reuters: Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed Monday. Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway's Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains."Looking back at the data we have from Zeppelin since the end of the 1980s it seems like the increase is accelerating" Johan Stroem, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the data compiled with Stockholm University. The rise in concentrations, close to an annual peak before carbon-absorbing plants start to grow in the northern hemisphere spring, was below the average gain over the year of around 2 parts per million.
…Recession in 2009 in many nations has not apparently affected gains. The International Energy Agency estimated in September that emissions of carbon dioxide would fall about 2.6 percent in 2009 because of a decline in industrial activity.
Concentrations can keep rising since each carbon molecule emitted typically lingers in the atmosphere for many years. The U.N. panel of climate scientists says the rise will cause more floods, mudslides, heatwaves, sandstorms and rising sea levels. The data "seem to show that we continue to emit as if there was no tomorrow," Kim Holmen, director of research at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the carbon readings…
Full moon at noon over Adventdalen, south of Longyearbyen, Svalbard, shot by PaterMcFly, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
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