By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) – Atmospheric levels of the main greenhouse gas are hitting new highs, with no sign yet that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions, a leading scientist said on Thursday. "The rise is in line with the long-term trend," Kim Holmen, research director at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the measurements taken by a Stockholm University project on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard off north Norway. Levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities, rose to 392 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere in Svalbard in December, a rise of 2-3 ppm from the same time a year earlier, he told Reuters. … "It’s too early to make that call," he said when asked if there were signs that economic slowdown was curbing the rise in emissions. And he said any such change would be hard to detect. "That’s a tricky one to do," he said. "If we had, for example, a year with an unusually warm Siberian winter, that could cancel the human variation." UPDATE: Looks like 392ppm is a local, high reading: Atmospheric CO2 levels make huge jump … or do they?
CO2 hits new peaks, no sign global crisis causing dip
