The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that the level of carbon dioxide in the Northern Hemisphere has crossed a significant threshold in the month of April.

This is the first time that CO2, or greenhouse gases, have been widespread for an entire month at 400 parts per million (ppm) throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

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To Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, 400 ppm may not sound in and of itself physically important, but it signals that humankind is pushing climate into unchartered territory.

Schmidt said that CO2 levels are higher now than when compared 800,000 years ago. This is based on the oldest ice from which scientists were able to retrieve when they drilled from the cores of the Antarctic ice sheet.

They found that CO2 levels were between 180 and 280-ppm at the time of the ice ages and have not reached the levels experienced last month.

According to the WMO, the 400-ppm means a 40 percent increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution started.

Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the WMO said in a statement that the increasing CO2 the world is witnessing will cause more droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.

He said that these new findings should wake people up about the rising levels of greenhouse gases that are driving climate change to the extreme.

"If we are to preserve our planet for future generations, we need urgent action to curb new emissions of these heat-trapping gases," Jarraud said in the statement.

The Northern Hemisphere is quite ahead when compared to the Southern Hemisphere in terms of greenhouse gas concentration. This is due to more advanced and higher industrial sources of emissions present in the north. It has more land use for vegetation, thus, dominating the CO2 cycle season.

When it goes full throttle in their operations, plants and other vegetation would start to draw huge amounts of CO2 from the air.

However, the long and steady rise in CO2 is highly attributed to human emissions. By 2015 or 2016, the WMO predicts that greenhouse gas levels will be more than the 400-ppm for the planet in an entire year.

Tagscardon dioxide, World Meteorological Organization, Greenhouse Gas