2023's Average CO2 Concentrations Released at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory. The correct descriptive word is "ugly."
Last edited Fri Feb 2, 2024, 10:11 AM - Edit history (1)
As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.
Facts matter.
When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.
A recent post of this nature is here: At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory, 2024 Starts With a Fairly Disgusting Bang.
As I've been reporting over the years in various contexts, the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide which is killing the planet fluctuate sinusoidally over the year, with the rough sine wave superimposed on a quadratic axis:
Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
The Observatory posts on its data pages curated and reviewed averages for daily, weekly, monthly, and annual data. I maintain spreadsheets for the latter three to use in calculations.
The annual figure for 2023 has now been added to the annual data page which covers 65 years of data, going back to 1959 when the average reading for that year was 315.98 ppm. For 2023 that average was 421.08 ppm. If one has not joined Greenpeace and thus can do simple math, this is an increase 105.10 ppm over 1959.
Of the ten highest year to year increases, eight have occurred in this century. Of the two that occurred in the 20th century, one occurred in 1998 when the rain forests in S.E. Asia caught fire after slash and burn fires set to make palm oil plantations for "renewable biodiesel" for Germany's "Renewable Energy Portfolio" went out of control. This was the 2nd highest increase ever observed, 2.96 ppm over 1997.
Of the ten highest year to year increases, five have occurred in the last ten years, including 2023, the year just passed, where the average concentration was the first to exceed 420 ppm, 421.08 ppm, the increase over 2022 was 2.52 ppm, when the average concentrations was 418.56 ppm. This is the 6th worst ever annual increase out of 65.
The first year to exceed 400 ppm was 2015, when the average was 401.01 ppm.
No one now living will ever see a reading below 400 ppm again, not in daily data, not in weekly data, not in monthly data, nor in annual data.
To remove all of the added CO2 since 2015, one would need to produce all of the energy that put it there, plus energy to recover the entropy of mixing, and do so with energy that is free of CO2 releases. This is the consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, which we sweep under the rug and ignore at our peril.
In 2004, when the average CO2 concentration in the planetary atmosphere was 377.70 ppm, two scientists, Pacala and Socolow, at Princeton University, a local university in my case where I sometimes attend lectures and where the faculty hypes so called "renewable energy" endlessly, wrote the famous "wedgies" paper, which contended that we had all the technology we needed to address climate change. They did a passable job, for Princeton Climate Scientists at least, to not vomit uncontrollably when they mentioned nuclear energy. (Princeton Scientists like to pretend that other than a fusion fantasy, nuclear energy doesn't exist and is extremely dangerous and will definitely result in a nuclear war; at least that's my impression of the attitude there, an impression that makes me want to throw up.)
One of the "wedges" they proposed was substituting dangerous natural gas for coal, which has more or less happened in the provincial United States, although worldwide, according to the 2023 World Energy Outlook the world burned more coal than ever before. The result of the partial US switch to gas is that things are worse than ever and getting worse faster than ever.
Don't worry, be happy:
A swell way to address the climate crisis is to have the climate scientific community at Princeton University and other places in academia and beyond is to chant the same thing over and over and over and over: Uncertain Futures. How to Overcome the Climate Impasse.
I am unshaken in my view, based not on wishful thinking but on observed data, that if one sees a book on climate change featuring wind turbines on the cover, one is reading the work of someone engaged in tiresome chanting and nothing else. Within 25 years, practically every wind turbine now operating on this planet will need to be replaced, using fossil fuels to engineer the replacement.
We need to stop kidding ourselves. The wild eyed expensive enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" that has run through the 21st century has been useless. It was not conceived to address climate change, and never really was about climate change. The climate rhetoric attached to it was an afterthought. This reactionary program of returning our energy supplies to dependence on the weather at a time we have destabilized the weather was conceived to attack nuclear energy and stopping nuclear energy's necessary growth. Slowing the growth of nuclear energy, which has played brilliantly into the hands of the dangerous fossil fuel industry, which is allowed to kill at will, is the only success of the "renewable energy" scam. Otherwise it has been useless, worse than useless actually.
After many decades of considerations of nuclear energy and advocating for it, I am seeing a cultural change in the traditional rote hostility to it, the safest and cleanest form of energy ever invented. It is not risk free, but it doesn't have to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. The decline in hostility is not enough, and even if it was "enough" whatever "enough" might be, it is too little too late.
We have viciously left all future generations with an intractable mess, converted the entire planet into a waste dump.
The best time to have gone whole hog for nuclear energy was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a nice day and enjoy the upcoming weekend.