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Published online 24 November 2005 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news051121-14

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Greenhouse-gas levels highest for 650,000 years

Climate record highlights extent of man-made change.

Current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years, say researchers who have finished cataloguing air bubbles trapped for millennia inside Antarctic ice. The record, which extends back over the past eight ice ages, shows that today's concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane far outstrip those in the past.

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