New Weekly Reading Record Established at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory.

[NNadir]

Somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the weekly 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.

I had the naive wishful thinking notion that restrictions on automobile traffic with all of the worldwide lock downs would lead to a slowing of carbon dioxide accumulations. Something quite different has been observed with the most recent weekly data.

The data from the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory:

Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Week beginning on March 22, 2020: 415.52 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 411.24 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 390.77 ppm
Last updated: March 29, 2020

This week's reading, 415.52 ppm is the highest weekly average ever recorded at Mauna Loa.

As I often note in this space the readings are sinusoidal, superimposed on a steadily rising slightly less than linear axis, as this graphic, which I often reproduce, from the Mauna Loa website shows:



Every year, like clockwork, a new all time record is set in May.

Last year's highest ever recorded value, recorded on May 9, 2019, was 415.39 ppm

The increase over 1 year ago is 4.28 ppm. As of this writing, there have been 2,303 such readings of increases recorded going back to 1975. This is the 11th highest such recorded comparative reading over the period noted.

This is the first such reading in 2020 to break into the top 50. Every year in the last four has resulted in one or more readings penetrating the top 50: 2016 had twenty such readings, 2017, just one, 2018, one, 2019, seven, and as of this writing, now, 2020, one.

Of the top 50 such readings, 29 have taken place in the last five years, 36 in the last ten years, and 40 in the twenty-first century.

If the fact that this reading is 24.75 ppm higher than it was ten years ago bothers you, don't worry, be happy. Just repeat over and over and over and over, until it becomes a modern day Gregorian chant - "Renewable energy is great! Renewable Energy is Great! Renewable energy is great! Renewable energy is great!" Talk about Elon Musk and his cobalt laced electric cars.

Maybe you'll feel better.

I won't.

My impression that I've been hearing all about how rapidly renewable 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 9.76 exajoules to 12.27 exajoules. World energy demand in 2018 was 599.34 exajoules. Unquestionably it will be higher in 2019 and in 2020.

10.63 exajoules is slightly over 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 2018 by 63.22 exajoules to 159.98 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 holiday when our orange gnome in the White House will unilaterially declare that everything has returned to "normal," whatever in his weak minded distracted self congratulatory universe, "normal" might be.

Take whatever pleasure you can under the circumstances. Despite all this, there are still beautiful things worth saving. If something like a "normal" in the Trumpian age of abnormal celebrations of ignorance ever comes again, we ought to concentrate on such saving.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[Turbineguy]

1. Has anyone done any reasearch

to see if plants convert CO2 to O2 more efficiently in higher CO2 environments?

[NNadir]

3. Yes, there's lots of work in this area.

The results are kind of a mixed bag, some plants do better, some do worse, many are about the same.

Given that we have destabilized the planetary weather systems, it may not be too wise to rely strictly on higher plants. Trees certainly help, and recently I've been studying the properties of lignin in particular as a tool for replacing many types of petroleum based long term use polymers, but we cannot be certain that forests will survive.

The pine beetle situation in the American West, where warmer weather lead to the killing of trees is a warning about what we might see.

I do think that algae is mildly promising, but mostly I focus my attention on possible industrial scale tools for the removal of carbon dioxide, which, I am increasingly led to believe, will involve processing seawater in such a way as to both clean it, desalinate it, remove water from the ocean by restoring depleted ground water reservoirs like the Ogallala acquifer - the depletion of these reservoirs I heard from a scientist working on such things during a Q&A at a lecture I attended is responsible for about 10% of sea rise - as well as recovering CO2 and sequestering it as carbon products with intrinsic value.

[CanonRay]

2. Same curve as the damn virus