Fun facts from Mauna Loa: Back over 400 ppm and rising fast...
Every few weeks or so, I check in at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory to update one or both of the spreadsheets I keep derived from the data therein. One such spreadsheet records the year to year increases in CO2 concentrations by month, the other by week. I use Excel functions to do some calculations to sort these increases by magnitude.
The general trend on the graphs available on the Mauna Loa website show that annual trends roughly describe a linearly increasing function as an axis with a sinusoidal function superimposed on this axis, reflecting the annual variation in absolute CO2 concentration. The minima each year are usually observed around September, owing to the distribution of land in the northern hemisphere as opposed to the southern hemisphere, and the maxima generally take place in the April-May timeframe.
I did this again this morning, updating the weekly data sheet, and noted, with huge regret, that as opposed to the year passed, when we surged over 400 ppm only in January of 2015 (the week of January 11), this year we did so nearly two months earlier, the week of November 8. In 2014, the 400 ppm milestone was not passed until March 16; in 2013, a single data point was over 400 pm, this in the week of May 26, 2013, that single data point (400.3 ppm) representing the maximum observed for that year.
Mauna Loa weekly carbon dioxide data, accessed 11/21/15
The data point, that for November 8, 2015, for the latest week represents an increase of 3.53 ppm over the corresponding week of 2014. Among the 2076 such data points recorded at Mauna Loa, which have been reported since 1976, this is tied with another week for the 32nd and 33rd highest such increase ever noted. (The highest value ever recorded, 4.76 ppm, occurred in September 1998 during the huge South Asian fires that destroyed huge swathes of the Indonesian rain forest, some of which fires were apparently triggered by efforts that went out of control to clear land for palm oil plantations to make "renewable" biofuels.)
The average increase for all of such data (weekly year to year increases) recorded, as of this date, at Mauna Loa since the late 1950's is a 1.73 ppm increase. For the 20th century, as recorded, the average was 1.54 ppm, including the period of the Indonesian fires. The average for the 21st century, up to the present day, is 2.02 ppm. The average for such data points for 2014 was 2.09 ppm; for 2015 to the present date, the average is 2.15 ppm. For the last 4 weeks, the average is 2.49 ppm.
I hear a lot of self congratulatory talk about how wonderful we're doing with our so called "renewable energy" scheme. As I noted elsewhere, in the last ten years, humanity spent nearly two trillion dollars on this scheme to make wind and solar energy viable.
Sustaining the Wind Part 1: Is Renewable Energy the Same as Sustainable Energy?
No one seems to pause to question in this exercise whether this scheme is working, but clearly and unambiguously it is not. The rate at which the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere is accelerating, not declining.
As I noted elsewhere in this space, a recent publication in one of the highest impact scientific journals in the world, Nature, has reported that the deaths from outdoor air pollution are also rising, not falling, with the number now standing at 3.54 million people per year worldwide, 1.4 million in China alone.
Nature: China's annual air pollution deaths now stand at 1.4 million per year.
Predictably this dire information produced little comment.
I have been appalled for many years by the insipid and poorly thought out attacks on what remains, despite much bull directed against it, the world's largest, by far, source of climate change free primary energy, nuclear energy. I regard all, 100%, of the people making such attacks as disingenuous and/or clueless about the magnitude of the environmental crisis before us. To my mind the number of such people who qualify as environmentalists is zero.
Post Fukushima, the year to year weekly data points for increases in carbon dioxide as measured at Mauna Loa are 2.18 ppm.
How many people died from radiation during this natural disaster again? Since March of 2011, how many people died from air pollution without a single natural disaster, but solely from the normal operations under the status quo?
In sadness, but also with more than a modicum of unrestrainable anger, I'd like to congratulate all the anti-nukes in the world on their remarkable success in marketing, while reminding myself at the same time of the awful consequences this puerile marketing has meant for all human generations that will come after us.
Have a great weekend.
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