Shanghai Shutdown Blip in Mauna Loa CO2 readings?
Earlier this year, I noted that our laboratories were having difficulty getting parts for repairing a major scientific instrument because of the unavailability of replacement circuit boards: The Health of Shanghai, Scientific Instrumentation, and Humans. This was not an antique instrument, but rather a "state of the art" relatively new instrument, supplied by a major American scientific instrument company that was spun off by corporation that once was the premier developer and manufacturer of advanced semiconductors. (Now they can't get parts unless the Chinese make them.)
Something that President Biden is wisely trying to reverse is the off shoring by American companies of all semiconductor chip manufacturing, but the caveat is that this technology is rather dirty: We have played an environmental shell game, and helped China (and other countries) become large polluters while declaring ourselves "green." Out of sight, out of mind.
China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but before we again declare ourselves "green" for "only" being number two, I would note that on a per capita basis, no other country comes close to US climate gas releases As was noted in a brief excerpt I made in another post, the US per capita CO2 releases are 43 kg/person-day, compared to a world average of 13 kg/person-day.
Disturbing statistics, if true.
Anyway, I check the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory every week to enter weekly data into a spreadsheet I use to follow the trends of how actively we're killing the (now burning) planet while we all wait (increasingly) breathlessly for the grand wind and solar energy nirvana that has not come, is not here, and, frankly, won't come.
This week's data, which comes at what should be near the annual minimum:
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Week beginning on August 28, 2022: 416.54 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 412.83 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 392.02 ppm
Last updated: September 04, 2022
This has been a relatively mild year at Mauna Loa for week to week increases, the average of all weeks this far being "only" 2.05 ppm, compared to 2.18 ppm in 2021, 2.58 ppm in 2020, and 2.90 ppm in 2019. However this week's reading, which is 3.71 ppm, which makes it the 45th largest reading for yearly week to week comparisons out of 2,430 readings from Mauna Loa in my spreadsheet, going back to 1975, albeit the only such reading in the top 50 this year.
Anyway.
This week, I note that observatory has changed it's graphics layout and added a few of another type.
The graphic that has previously been on the "Weekly Average" page linked above is now moved to another "Interactive Plots" tab and is now, as the label indicates interactive at the site: Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Interactive Graphics
The static graphic as of this writing looks like this:
It clearly shows the sinusoidal variations superimposed on a quadratic axis.
I made a crude "curve fitting" estimate of the quadratic axis's equation elsewhere:
A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.
A new graphic, showing the last two years is also available on this "interactive" page. The static version is shown below:
It shows a "blip" - a deviation from the purely sinusoidal behavior of previous years as the seasons advance - for March of 2022, when Shanghai was under lockdown.
The graphic that now appears on the "Last Year" Tab at the Observatory site shows the "blip" even more clearly:
It does seem clear to me that this unusual "blip" is probably related to the Shanghai lockdown, but my opinion is unschooled compared to the atmospheric scientists who collect and post the data at the Observatory. They get asked the question, apparently, about the effects of Covid on climate gases frequently and have posted their more rigorous (than my inference) remarks here:
Can we see a change in the CO2 record because of COVID-19?
These remarks do not refer to the visible "blip" I've discussed, but then again, the remarks have not changed much if I recall correctly, very much since I last looked at them, probably many months ago.
It's interesting.
Irrespective of the effect of Covid on the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is now proceeding at a rate (as I've calculated from weekly data 10 year comparisons as a 12 month running average) of 2.50 ppm/year. This is the highest value observed since the 1980s, and has been more or less monotonically increasing since them.
The big solar and wind fantasy on which we've expended trillions of dollars on this planet in this century was actually never really about climate change; it was about replacing the only option to address climate change that would have worked, with emphasis on the conditional word "would," nuclear energy.
There has been hell to pay for the reactionary view that we should make our energy supplies dependent on the weather as humanity did for centuries, abandoning the practice for still operative reasons, clearly a Faustian bargain (fossil fuels), but a bargain that was made and with which must now live.
There is hell to pay. The planet is on fire.
I trust you're enjoying the Labor Day weekend.
