Ooh! Big Numbers! Scary!

The Metro runs a mercifully brief article as follows:

Carbon dioxide is at its highest level in the atmosphere for more than 2million years, scientists have revealed.

The peak CO2 levels over the last 2.1million years averaged 280 parts per million but today it is 38 per cent higher at 385 parts per million, US research has shown. A 'spike' in the levels coincided with the start of the industrial age. It means scientists will have to search back further in time to find conditions comparable with those driving modern-day climate change.

I dutifully Googled global temperature 2 million years ago and the second result, a geology website, features this chart, plotting "Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time" (click to enlarge):

Make of that what you will, remembering that the black line is not the definite C02 level, it's just the mid-point of a range of estimates.