Just like last month, a record was set in April 2010. Just like last month, the corporate media was absolutely silent about it. Cons like to whine about how liberal the media is. Don’t you think if the media had a liberal slant, they wouldn’t hesitate to trumpet rising CO2 concentrations?
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured at Mauna Loa, Hawai’i were the highest for a single calendar month in our history: 392.39ppm.
Monthly data for the past four years and the entire 52-year dataset can be found at NOAA’s ESRL Trends website.
The change from April 2009 to April 2010 was 2.93ppm, one of the largest jumps for the same month from one year to the next in the observations.
It should come as no surprise that record CO2 concentrations year after year have helped lead to the warmest March on record (March 2010), the 2nd warmest year on record (2009) and the warmest decade on record (the 2000s). This year should be another one of the warmest, if not the warmest, on record due to various states of climatological cycles (El Nino, NAO, etc).
Keep in mind, however, that we’re also currently just coming out of the longest solar minimum in the past century. Climate change deniers like to say that the solar cycle still controls most of the year-to-year variation seen in our climate. If the 2nd warmest year on record occurred during a solar minimum, what do they think will happen in the next 5 years? Those record CO2 concentrations are starting to take over as a leading factor in the climate. That won’t change until the concentrations are forced back under 350ppm.