Our Climate Death Spiral: Charts, Maps, and Graphs Edition

By now you are likely aware that carbon dioxide levels have reached 400 parts per million in Earth's atmosphere. It's been three million years since that last happened, but there were no humans around then to endure the epic sea level rise, crazy droughts, hotter temps, and the mass swampification of once-arable land.

Scientists are just as certain as ever that this is the case—a recent study revealed that 97% of scientific papers that tackle climate change confirm it's caused by human activity—but many people remain unconvinced. Maybe that's because words are often boring, and a lot of them are written on the internet, where it is especially easy not to believe things.

Good thing then that we also have charts, visualizations, maps and graphs. Yes, charts are also posted on the internet. They are, however, arguably easier to not be distracted from. So, in the name of good data ecology, here is the story of our 400 ppm world told with fewer words, and more lines and numbers. Starting with the most important number of all:

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as measured by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, has climbed from under 320 to 400 ppm in just fifty years. That means CO2, a powerful greenhouse gas, is warming the globe a hell of a lot more than it was half a decade ago. Before we had factories and power plants—say, a century ago—the number was 280 ppm. The world has rapidly warmed since then, as NASA shows us in this animated map of temperatures over the last 130 years:

As average global air temperatures have risen, so too have those of the oceans.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the heat content of the world's oceans has skyrocketed alongside the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere—our oceans are warmer and warming still. They are also acidifying. Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting. Fast.

That orange line denotes the average Arctic ice extent in 1979. The white mass is where it was measured last year—the lowest extent on record; it is quite clearly melting away.

As was noted on the Arctic Sea Ice blog, this trend is nearly a perfect inversion of the previous two charts. Which makes sense—carbon spikes, the heat's cranked up, oceans warm, and the Arctic melts.

All of this because humans have relied upon carbon-rich fossil fuels to power their lives and societies: decades of burning coal and oil have hot-boxed the planet. Those charts, graphs, and maps above tell a pretty straighforward story of what happened next—and what's going to keep happening if we don't keep the rest of that coal and oil in the ground.