This, is really quite something. We know the Guardian has lost just about all journalistic standards, but this one really takes the cake, especially from somebody who should know better. See the screen cap below.

“The atmosphere right now is half-full of carbon dioxide”.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2014/jan/22/eu-2030-climate-change-energy-emissions-targets

Erm, riiiggght.

Let see, Mauna Loa/ Scripps says:

398.58 parts per million (ppm) CO2 in air 20-Jan-2014 http://t.co/5Q2FLbb4ix — Keeling_Curve (@Keeling_curve) January 21, 2014

Maybe Damian doesn’t understand that whole “parts per million” thing, if he did, he’s certainly know that 398.58 is nowhere close to “half full”. The value of 500,000 parts per million is what would be considered “half-full”. He’s only off be a couple orders of magnitude.

If indeed CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere was 500,000 parts per million, we’d have a big problem: we’d all be dead.

Maybe he was thinking in terms of saturation of the CO2 effect in the atmosphere on temperature? In that case, we are closer to 90%, and additional CO2 won’t make much difference.

This graph showing CO2′s temperature response to supplement the one Doug Hoffman cites from IPCC AR4. here we see that we are indeed pretty close to saturation of the response.

click for larger image

The “blue fuzz” represents measured global CO2 increases in our modern times.

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