Fossil fuels are the only source of carbon dioxide large enough to raise atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts so high so quickly.
Despite a run-in with an iceberg and the world’s worst sailing conditions, Saildrone 1020 successfully completed its 13,670-nautical-mile journey around Antarctica, and indicated that parts of the Southern Ocean emit carbon dioxide in winter.
Global atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 405.0 parts per million (ppm) in 2017, a new record high. In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.6 ppm per year. Over the past decade, however, the growth rate has been closer to 2.3 ppm per year.
About a third of the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning winds up in the global ocean. Repeat cruises help scientists understand what happens to that carbon below the water surface.
Thanks to warming winters and thawing permafrost, Arctic soil microbes are churning out carbon dioxide well after the end of the growing season ends. This extra source of atmospheric carbon may accelerate a regional warming trend that is already twice as fast as the global average.
A record-smashing hurricane season in the central North Pacific. Water rationing in Puerto Rico. The biggest one-year jump in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. These and more of 2015's extreme events had one thing in common: El Niño.
Scientists estimated global average carbon dioxide concentration at 397.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2014, as the global growth rate of carbon dioxide continues to accelerate.
For 800,000 years before the twentieth century, carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere never exceeded 300 parts per million. In March 2015, the monthly average went above 400 ppm for the first time.
Every year hundreds of scientists from scores of countries team up to give the Earth's climate a comprehensive physical. Edited by NOAA scientists and published by the American Meteorological Society, the State of the Climate in 2015 draws on tens of thousands of observations of everything from forest fires to fish migration to catalog climate variability and change.