Green Daily

It's great to see celebrities getting greener, consumers getting eco-smarter and Al Gore pissing-off FOX news. With positive stories everywhere, it's easy to get a warm fuzzy feeling that the earth is going to be all right.

Then you see the science. Figures recently published on the web site of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that carbon dioxide, everyone's favorite greenhouse gas, is building up faster than expected and is currently at a record high, renewing fears that global warming could slide out of control.

Here are the numbers: Currently, the planet has 387 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 floating around - that's the highest it has been in the last 650,000 years and up 40% since the industrial revolution. What's scarier is the increased rate of concentration. From 1970 to 2000 the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose annually by 1.5 ppm. More recently, the increase since 2000 has been 2.1 ppm, per year on average. Just last year, the mean concentration of carbon dioxide went up by 2.14 ppm. We're concentrating CO2 into the air now more than ever.

What do all of these numbers mean? While the earth can naturally soak up about half of our future carbon output every year, through forests and oceans, these newly reported figures may make policy people rethink current, overly optimistic, emission reduction plans.