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(Washington) There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point in the last 650,000 years, says a major new study that let scientists peer back in time at greenhouse gases that can help fuel global warming.

By analyzing tiny air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for millennia, a team of European researchers highlights how people are dramatically influencing the buildup of these gases.

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Today, scientists directly measure levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of fuel-burning and other processes. Those gases help trap solar heat, like the greenhouses for which they are named, and are believed to result in a gradual warming of the planet.

The measurements are disturbing: Levels of carbon dioxide have climbed from 280 parts per million two centuries ago to 380 ppm today. Earth's average temperature, meanwhile, has increased more than half a degree Celsius in recent decades, a relatively rapid rise. Many climate specialists warn that continued warming could have severe impacts, such as rising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns.

Skeptics sometimes dismiss the rise in greenhouse gases as part of a naturally fluctuating cycle. The new study provides ever-more definitive evidence countering that view, however.

Deep Antarctic ice encases tiny air bubbles formed when snowflakes fell over hundreds of thousands of years. Extracting the air allows a direct measurement of the atmosphere at past points in time, to determine the naturally fluctuating range.

A previous ice-core sample had traced greenhouse gases back about 440,000 years. This new sample, from east Antarctica, goes 210,000 years further back in time.

Today's still rising level of carbon dioxide already is 27 per cent higher than its peak during all those millennia, said lead researcher Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

"We are out of that natural range today," he said.

Moreover, that rise is occurring at a speed that "is over a factor of a hundred faster than anything we are seeing in the natural cycles," Stocker said. "It puts the present changes in context."

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[ 28 November 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

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Many Canadians go to their local outdoor hockey rink to skate and live the dream of scoring that winning Stanley Cup goal. But this quintessential slice of Canadian life in wintertime is slowly melting away because of global warming, says a collection of young environmentalists.

"A bunch of us are fairly avid hockey fans and hockey players and we noticed that we were waiting longer and longer every year to play, and then we started phoning rink operators and were told the same story," said Mike Hudema of Global Exchange.

"It's not only that the season is getting shorter but it's also the (fewer) number of the cold days in a row. Suddenly you get a real warm spell where your entire rink will melt, and so getting a nice clean surface is really hard."

Hudema, a 28-year-old from Edmonton, Alta., said the campaign, launched over the weekend, has been joined by about a dozen environmental groups, including the heavy-hitting World Wildlife Fund.

Hudema said volunteers "frustrated with having to play hockey games on slush" have already started to hand out postcards at NHL games across the country urging people to pressure Ottawa to take action.

They are also organizing a series of protest outdoor hockey games. One game scheduled for Whitehorse was cancelled last week because of warm weather.

They also plan to stage a mock funeral for shinny hockey outside the Montreal conference on climate change that opens on Monday.

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