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Despite the influx of Office trivia night invites, nature is in fact not healing. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in modern history and 50% higher than in preindustrial times, according to new findings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
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In fact, to find a time when Earth’s atmosphere had this much CO2 in it, you’d have to go back at least 4.1 million years ago to the Pliocene Epoch, when sea levels were almost 80 feet higher than today.
But what about the pandemic? Global emissions fell 7% last year due to travel restrictions and the general slowdown in human activity. However, as the new data reveals, that didn’t do much to change the long-term trajectory of carbon emissions.
That’s because every year, the world adds ~40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere. A brief commuting break can’t offset the CO2 that sticks around in the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years.
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Read the original article on Business Insider