March 2016 blows away the record for annual CO2 increases over previous March readings: 3.31 ppm.

[NNadir]

9. Forest fires in SE Asia were very much involved in the 1997-1998 event, and until 2015...

...1998 was the worst year ever recorded.

This said, since the turn of the century, the rate of increase has been accelerating without major fires.

This can be seen by evaluating all of the data for annual increases from 1959 to the present date, which covers all the time that the carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa has been operating.

From 1959 until 2000, a period of 41 years, there were five years where the increase exceeded 2.00 ppm, 1977, 1983, 1987, 1988 and 1998. Of these, only one year exceeded 2.5 ppm, the year of the SE Asian fires, 1998, at 2.93 ppm.

Since 2000, a period of 15 years, there have been nine years that exceeded 2.00 ppm, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, the latter being the first to exceed 3.00 ppm. Four of these nine years exceeded 2.50 ppm, 2015, 2012, 2005, and 2002. It now seems possible that we will never see a year with an increase below 2.00 ppm again.

2016 is unbelievably bad so far. The weekly averages for increases over the same week of the year before, now stands at 3.25 ppm. The same average for the worst year ever observed, last year, was 2.25 ppm.

The grotesque failure to manage climate change gas releases can therefore not be attributed to forest fires alone.

One cause is that humanity has been telling itself a big lie, which is that if it throws huge sums of money at so called "renewable energy," it will make a difference. With more than 2 trillion dollars down the rabbit hole in the last ten years, and the numbers of dollars so wasted each year rising rather than falling, this approach is a clear and unambiguous failure. So called "renewable energy" has not worked, is not working, and will not work because of its low energy to mass ratio, its reliance on relatively rare materials, and its unpredictabilty and poor reliability.

Conversely, the superior form of energy, nuclear energy, has been maligned unmercifully by poor thinkers with small minds, and even though it remains, by far, the world's largest source of essentially climate gas free energy, there have been many poor decisions, like stupidly choosing to burn dangerous fossil fuels in Japan after Fukushima - air pollution from these fuels kill millions of people each year - because nuclear energy was claimed, insipidly, to be "unsafe."

The solubility of carbon dioxide in water decreases with rising temperature, as anyone who has opened a warm soda can on a hot day can easily see. Temperatures, in particular surface temperatures have been rising, and this is some feedback effect because of the decreased carbon dioxide solubility into the largest sink, the ocean. Since carbon dioxide, as well as the pollutants such as sulfates, sulfites, nitrates, and nitrites are all acidic, the ocean has been acidifying measurably, with the result that the solubility of carbon dioxide is falling even more than mere temperature suggests. The stability of methane and carbon dioxide hydrates also decreases with rising temperatures. Release from permafrost is also a factor. None of these effects are under human control, and we may be reaching a tipping point in many places on the planet where these issues are concerned.

It is no longer possible to attribute the accelerating disaster to any one event or cause. Human fear and ignorance and wishful thinking are all involved, but the failure to defeat the myths behind them has now probably pushed the situation beyond the region where any human action can matter all that much.

Have a nice week.