Current CO2 Releases Are 10 Times Higher Than in Past Era, Study Says

Carbon is being released into the atmosphere 10 times faster today than during a previous geological era when the Earth experienced significant warming, a new study says. In the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists used rock and sediment samples from a coal mining operation in Norway to do a detailed analysis of the planet’s CO2 emissions during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when the Earth’s temperature rose by at least 9 degrees F over a 20,000-year period. Their analysis, the most thorough to date of the PETM, showed that carbon emissions during that era were nearly 10 times less than the 8 billion metric tons of CO2 being emitted today. The maximum amount of CO2 emitted annually during the PETM was 1.7 billion tons, which is still less than four times current emissions. “It is possible that [the current rate] is faster than ecosystems can adapt,” said Lee R. Kump, a Penn State University geoscientist.