New Weekly Record High for Carbon Dioxide Established at Mauna Loa.

[NNadir]

From the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory:

Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Week beginning on April 14, 2019: 413.59 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 410.99 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 388.66 ppm
Last updated: April 21, 201

The increase over 1 year ago is 2.60 ppm.

The value recorded here, 413.59 ppm, is the highest weekly average reading ever reported at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

If the fact that this reading is 24.93 ppm higher than it was ten years ago bothers you, don't worry, be happy. I read right here on the E&E pages that solar power installations are on the rise in Minnesota.

My impression that I've been hearing all about how rapidly solar energy has been growing since I began writing here in 2002, when the reading on April 14, 2002 was 375.14 ppm should not disturb you, since it is better to think everything is fine rather than focus on reality.

In this century, the solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 8.12 exajoules to 10.63 exajoules. World energy demand in 2017 was 584.98 exajoules. Unquestionably it will be higher in 2019.

10.63 exajoules is under 2% of the world energy demand.

2018 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

According to this report, the fastest growing source of energy on the planet in the 21st century over all was coal, which grew from 2000 to 2017 by 60.25 exajoules to 157.01 exajoules.

If you think that unlike you, I am worrying and not being happy, you can always chant stuff about how "by 2050" or "by 2075" or "by 2100" we'll all live in a so called "renewable energy" nirvana powered by the sun and tooling around in Tesla electric cars.

I may be too jaded to be comforted, having heard this stuff my whole adult life - and I'm not young - but you could try. It's not results that count, but good intentions.

To those among us who are Christians, I wish you a Happy Easter.

[defacto7]

1. Though I have no personal investment in mythical bunnies

that leave us chocolate effigies of themselves nor interest in bronze age implements of torture and have no more understanding of how they relate to each other any more than I understand why the myth of renewable energy persists, I do wish you a happy April 21st.

[NNadir]

2. Thanks, but I wouldn't compare mythical...

...bunnies with the widespread belief that solar and wind energy will address climate change.

After all, children do find chocolate on Easter morning but no one has seen solar and wind facilities stop climate change.

[The_jackalope]

3. Since 2000 the world has added over 4x as much fossil as low-carbon energy

But we've been screwed for much longer than that. This is just my personal opinion, but I think we've been screwed ever since the social changes in the Sahara, Caucasus and Asian desert regions that were triggered by the 5.9 kiloyear climate event coincided with the beginning of the Bronze Age. IMO that was when "high-tech" bronze-age human society stopped giving a fuck about the planet or any of the other life on it, and set out on a mission to conquer and own everything.

[defacto7]

4. That's a very interesting take. By following the same model

I would think it was even earlier than that. With the migration of the Indo Europeans west and south around 6k bce we begin to see advancement of communication and language at least as we are able to determine, then an explosion of intelligence and the beginnings of civilization with the Sumerians and whatnot. I think what you see happening in 3k bce is a continuance of what had already coalesced thousands of years before, maybe 100k before. My opinion would be that intelligence itself was the evolutionary anomaly that signed our demise as a species with all the pillage and plunder that resonates today. An evolutionary fluke caused homo sapiens sapien to develop intelligence so quickly we outpaced the natural development necessary to stay connected to our environment; we left the rest of the natural world behind. Our intellect separated us from our source. Suddenly we became a virus feeding on our host. We don't really belong here and we won't be here long because we are a failed species.
My 2 cents.

[The_jackalope]

5. That's pretty much the view I used to hold.

I think it has one major problem, though. It doesn't explain the global persistence of relatively peaceful, egalitarian indigenous societies that were not dominated by an ideology of expansion through conquest. Many of these societies survived until they were steamrolled by Europeans. I held the "failed species" view for a decade, until I encountered the work on "Saharasia" by Dr. James DeMeo. Now I see the problem as cultural - which doesn't mean it's any more soluble. A violent global culture that has overrun the planet is just as constraining to human behaviour as the laws of thermodynamics and the influence of genetics.

[defacto7]

6. Interesting concept. Thanks for the tip and I'll read up.

Questions that come to me: just how egalitarian and peaceful were the indigenous societies? There's a lot of evidence for ultra clanism on both sides of the planet in prehistory Asia and Europe as well as early and pre-Columbian societies. Even the Norte Chico people weren't exactly at one with nature in their sollitude. Were the peaceful societies an anomaly in themseves that were destined to die out by the inevitable rise of the warrior human or was their advancing intelligence destined to catch up with them anyway? I don’t think that's knowable. But we do know that our intellect is resposible for our concept of self as separate from our environment and the view that we have better and greater value. Even in later times we have examples of highly advanced peaceful and productive western humans without war and conquest in their society. Enter the Minoans, yet they were the best sword manufacturers of their time which were prized by other warring cultures. Ironic.

I'm interested in your study material and I will check it out.

[The_jackalope]

8. While indigenous societies weren't all peaceful.

they were not generally predicated on warfare and conquest. "Warfare societies" apparently sprang from a cradle stretching from the Saharan region through the Caucasus to Mongolia and into the Gobi desert. This cultural character spread according to the dynamic described by Andrew Schmookler in "The Parable of the Tribes":

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace, and that one is ambitious for expansion and conquest? What can happen to the others when confronted by an ambitious and potent neighbor? Perhaps one tribe is attacked and defeated, its people destroyed and its lands seized for the use of the victors. Another is defeated, but this one is not exterminated; rather, it is subjugated and transformed to serve the conqueror. A third seeking to avoid such disaster flees from the area into some inaccessible (and undesirable) place, and its former homeland becomes part of the growing empire of the power-seeking tribe. Let us suppose that others observing these developments decide to defend themselves in order to preserve themselves and their autonomy. But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force.

I have just outlined four possible outcomes for the threatened tribes: destruction, absorption and transformation, withdrawal, and imitation. In every one of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes.

Schmookler's "Parable" has been criticized as being based on a European social model, and not being applicable to tribal life in general. But if the cradle of conquest civilization was in fact a minority of tribes in Europe, this is not a shortcoming but rather a vote in favour of its accuracy.

To take the discussion back to its original point, conquest is a high-energy practice, in which those who can bring the most energy to bear on others tend to win. So it's no surprise that conquest achieved its apotheosis using fossil fuels.

[defacto7]

9. I can agree with

the idea of a dominant culture threatening a less dominant culture into a cycle of "destruction, absorption and transformation, withdrawal, and imitation". This makes sense. But isn't this more simply a theory of the history of warfare societies rather than the origin of the human condition that made it possible to become warfare societies? What would be the factor that made it possible for humans to conceive of domination? Do you think humans not faced with inevitable earth changes and changes in social behavour that come with population expansion would have remained passive? Other animals fight for territory, eat their own young when necessary and sometimes when it's not, exterminate rivals as well as subjugate them to further their particular DNA. Species have vanished over such rivalry. But what makes humans stand out among lifeforms on the planet? I think it's a type of over expansive intellect that gained the ability (or disability) to perceive separation from all other life forms, self-awareness. I think it was inevitable that an awareness growing at a rate faster than it could perceive the consequenses would eventually create a state where the desire for domination would exceed the need for survival. Maybe the 5.9 ky event was the inevitable turning point in human history where we met our destiny and its consequenses. But the real progenitor of human power lust and our eventual extermination lies in our intellect anomaly. .

To take the discussion back to its original point, conquest is a high-energy practice, in which those who can bring the most energy to bear on others tend to win. So it's no surprise that conquest achieved its apotheosis using fossil fuels.

And I really like your final paragraph.

[hatrack]

7. As of yesterday, we now have seven all-time daily records for CO2 in 2019, instead of 6

22 April 2019 - 414.14 ppm

A reminder - this compares with three all-time daily records in all of 2018, two each in 2017 and 2016, and one in 2015.

https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2

[defacto7]

10. ...

...

[NNadir]

11. Well, I'm too old to follow that statistic. It might give me a stroke. n/t