Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumPaper in Nature Climate Change: We will never again see monthly readings less than 400 ppm...
...in our lifetimes. As anyone familiar with my record here will know, I have been reporting on the disastrous climate events that have been taking place in 2016 where the carbon dioxide concentrations have been climbing at a record pace.
My last entry on this topic was here: July 31, 2016: Mauna Loa carbon dioxide levels 5.04 ppm higher than one year ago.
On July 31, 2016, the concentration of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa was 403.47 ppm; one year ago it was 398.43 ppm.
Mauna Loa Weekly Trends, accessed Aug 7, 2016
During summers in the Northern Hemisphere, carbon dioxide levels fall slightly from the peaks usually observed in April or May; the minimums usually occur in September. The 2016 max, observed during the week ending on April 10, 2016 was 408.31 ppm.
All of humanity's efforts to address climate change have failed. This includes all the, rhetoric, charts and graphs about the "triumph" of so called "renewable energy" on which we bet, foolishly as it turns out, our planet's atmosphere.
Some folks in the primary scientific literature have commented on it as well.
The paper attached comes from the journal Nature Climate Change:
El Niño and a record CO2 rise (Richard A. Betts,
Chris D. Jones, Jeff R. Knight, Ralph F. Keeling & John J. Kennedy , Nature Climate Change 6, 806810 (2016))
Some excerpts:
The introduction:
The relationship between 1998 and 2016:
The recent El Niño, now in its declining phase, was comparable with the 19971998 event in some respects. Although maximum SSTs were cooler in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Niño 3.4 index was 2.6 ± 0.30 °C over November 2015 to January 2016 (larger than November 1997 to January 1998) and most tropical land regions were again anomalously dry. Once again, drought conditions allowed human-caused fires in Indonesia to burn large areas. Estimates for 2015 suggest that the total greenhouse gas emissions from these fires is equivalent to 0.4 GtC, with large uncertainty less than those in 1997 13, but still larger than for non-El Niño years.
Some comment on the "meaning" of 400 ppm:
And now the depressing part, wherein the bold is mine.
In the longer term, a reduction in CO2 concentration would require substantial and sustained cuts in anthropogenic emissions to near zero. Even the lowest emissions/concentrations scenario assessed in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report projects CO2 concentrations to remain above 400 ppm until 2150. This scenario, RCP2.621, is considered amongst the lowest credible emissions scenario, and relies on assumed development of 'negative emissions' methods whose potential is considered limited22. Indeed some argue that RCP2.6 is now beyond reach without radical changes in global society23. Hence our forecast supports the suggestion24 that the Mauna Loa record will never again show CO2 concentrations below the symbolic 400 ppm within our lifetimes.
If any of this bothers you, don't worry, be happy.
Those assholes at Greenpeace are continuously and constantly predicting that sometime after they and everyone else who had to sit through their tiresome repetitive and illiterate bullshit will be dead, the world will be a 100% renewable nirvana. The fact that they have been predicting this endlessly and continuously and that things are getting much, much, much worse, and not better, has no meaning.
As you may know, Greenpeace is not an organization where people do science, science being a practice in which results trump theory. You can't get into Greenpeace if you're aware of the contents of an engineering or biology or chemistry or physics or math book - but if you join Greenpeace you sure can talk, and talk, and talk - especially on subjects you know nothing about - even as the rest of us, and all future generations choke, and choke, and choke and choke.
So called "renewable energy" didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work, but it's not results, but the thought that counts.
Have a lovely weekend.
pscot
(21,024 posts)350 ppm was the symbolic number. Happy times.
NNadir
(33,545 posts)I think he does.
From what I can tell - and I'm not really not all that familiar with him - he's another of those fools who doesn't "trust" the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas change primary energy and calls for throwing more and more and more trillions of dollars at Cadmium and lanthanide mines.
There are lots of these wishful thinking types making things worse and worse and worse, Joe Romm, Amory Lovins, that complete idiot Mark Z. Jacobsen at Stanford, that badly educated fool Benjamin Sovacool.
The world would be better off if they just sat home in front of their TV's watching Superman reruns from the 1950's, but regrettably, that won't happen.