For Only the 3rd Time in Its Records, the CO2 Readings at Mauna Loa Are Above 417 ppm.

[NNadir]

As I have remarked many times in this forum, and when I was writing there, the E&E forum, somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the weekly data, reported at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, of carbon dioxide concentrations, 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.

I have noted many times, with sadness and regret, that we on the left are not free of such fear ignorance and dogma, although I wish we were. We cannot, with justice, attribute this outcome to Ronald Reagan, George Bush the first and second, and Donald Trump. We bear responsibility, no matter how much we pat ourselves on the back for our insane, and frankly, delusional worship of so called "renewable energy."

The amount of money "invested" in so called "renewable energy" in the period between 2004 and 2018 is over 3.036 trillion dollars; dominated by solar and wind which soaked up 2.774 trillion dollars.

Source: UNEP/Bloomberg Global Investment in Renewable Energy, 2019

This is an amount that is larger than the GDP of India, a nation with 1.4 billion people in it.

It is obvious that all the money thrown at so called "renewable energy" did not work, is not working, if the definition of "working" reflects dealing with climate change. I, for one, am absolutely and irrevocably certain that even more money, tens of trillions of dollars, will not work if this is the goal, and not simply keeping the mining and semiconductor industries flush with money changing hands.

The reason is physics. The laws of physics are not determined by popular opinion, delusional or otherwise. They are independent of politics, and politicians ignore them at the peril of all humanity. The reason that so called "renewable energy" has failed, is failing and will always fail is the low energy to mass ratio associated with it, along with its intrinsic variability.

The data at Mauna Loa fluctuates with the seasons, a roughly sinusoidal curve whose axis is a quasi-linear (slightly parabolic actually) pretty much monotonically increasing line:



The annual maxima are usually seen sometime in May of any given year; the annual minima usually occur in September or October,

Here is the data from the Mauna Loa observatory for the week beginning January 31, 2021:

Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Week beginning on January 31, 2021: 417.12 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 414.50 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 392.19 ppm
Last updated: February 7, 2021

This is only the third such measurement to ever exceed 417 ppm at the Mauna Loa observatory, going back to the 1950's. Weekly data points are available for the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory going back to the week beginning May 25, 1975, when the reading was 331.10 ppm. Last year, the annual maximum was recorded as 417.43 ppm for the week beginning May 24, 2020, and the week after, beginning May 31, 2020 recorded a value of 417.20 ppm.

In terms of the comparison with weekly measurements recorded 10 years ago, the difference recorded here, 24.93 ppm, is the 10th highest among all 10 year week to comparisons, out of 1891 such data points available in my spreadsheet.

There is considerable noise in these measurements. There has been a lot of speculation about the effect of Covid-19 on carbon dioxide accumulations in 2020, and it is possible that this year may show up as "lighter than usual" - at least for these times, although the trend in annual increases, since the first weeks of 2021 have been showing unusually mild increases over the previous year, averaging "only" 1.96 ppm higher than the same four weeks of 2020. Similarly the last 4 weeks of 2020, the weeks of December, the average was "only" 2.22 ppm.

I'm personally not mislead, since the average of all week to week comparators between weeks of 2020 and weeks of 2019 was 2.58 ppm, which, compared with values in the 20th century, is obscenely high.

Here is how the Mauna Loa observatory calculates annual increases:

The annual mean rate of growth of CO2 in a given year is the difference in concentration between the end of December and the start of January of that year. If used as an average for the globe, it would represent the sum of all CO2 added to, and removed from, the atmosphere during the year by human activities and by natural processes. There is a small amount of month-to-month variability in the CO2 concentration that may be caused by anomalies of the winds or weather systems arriving at Mauna Loa. This variability would not be representative of the underlying trend for the northern hemisphere which Mauna Loa is intended to represent. Therefore, we finalize our estimate for the annual mean growth rate of the previous year in March, by using the average of the most recent November-February months, corrected for the average seasonal cycle, as the trend value for January 1. Our estimate for the annual mean growth rate (based on the Mauna Loa data) is obtained by subtracting the same four-month average centered on the previous January 1. Preliminary values for the previous year are calculated in January and in February.

The estimated uncertainty in the Mauna Loa annual mean growth rate is 0.11 ppm/yr. This estimate is based on the standard deviation of the differences between monthly mean values measured independently by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and by NOAA/ESRL. The annual growth rate measured at Mauna is not the same as the global growth rate, but it is quite similar. One standard deviation of the annual differences MLO minus global is 0.26 ppm/year.

Using this method of calculation, there were, in the 40 year period between 1959 and 1999 five years in which the carbon dioxide concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide increased by more than 2.0 ppm. In the 21st century, 13 out of 20 have exceeded 2.0 ppm increases.

However, the preliminary figure for the increase, perhaps calculated differently, linked on the data page at the Mauna Loa website shows the increase for 2020 as being 2.57 ppm.

The trends are clear enough from this bar graph on the Mauna Loa website:



Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii

If any of this troubles you, don't worry, be happy. Head on over to our E&E forum and read all about how some bourgeois person over there has put solar cells on the roof of his or her McMansion, and is saving money which he or she can use to buy his or her Tesla electric car.

It doesn't do much for me, but maybe you're different than I am.

Have a nice Sunday afternoon.

[lutherj]

1. Here's some more pleasant reading for a Sunday morning:

https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/

A 2008 study by Graham Turner, then a senior CSIRO research scientist, used three decades of real-world historical data to conclude that the Limits to Growth model’s predictions were coming to pass: “30 years of historical data compare favourably with key features of a business-as-usual [BAU] scenario called the ‘standard run’ scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.”

Turner updated the model more recently, and puts global collapse at some point in the next 20 years.