Where were you on November 11, 2015?
It was only a couple weeks ago, but already you may not remember. It was a humming but unexceptional news day. In the United States, protestors at the University of Missouri had just successfully ousted their president. Marco Rubiohad done fine at the fourth Republican presidential debate, held the night before. And much of Europe and the English-speaking world were honoring Armistice Day.
In two or 10 years’ time, we might recognize that Wednesday as world-historic. On November 11, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii—which produces some of the most accurate and longest-running measurements of atmospheric carbon in the world—recorded that, of every million molecules in the atmosphere, 399.68 were carbon dioxide. On the following day, November 12, it measured 401.64 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Since then, its measurement of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has waxed and waned, but always stayed above 400 ppm. (On Monday, they read 400.15 ppm.)
[For more of this story, written by Robinson Meyer, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/sci...-last-day-of/417378/]
Comments (0)