The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica) has just completed a 3.2 km deep ice core extraction in east Antarctica. This enables sampling of the atmosphere over the last 800 thousand years.
The scary thing is the rate of change of CO2 in the core. Never in the past 800 thousand years it exceeded 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume in a thousand years. That is, except for in the last century.
"The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years", said Dr Eric Wolff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). That is over 50 times faster than ever before.
Read more on BBC News.