INDEX	Tuesday December 1, 2020
Climate change problem solved --except CO2 goes rocketing up
This tweet and rather messy graph (sorry about that) reveals that atmospheric Carbon Dioxide levels have increased by more than 1% in the last 12 months. The data comes originally from the Mauna Loa station and is unusual in the world of Climate Change, in that it is unfiltered. What you see is what they discovered and has not been refined in any way, probably. The reading from a couple of days ago (November 29) is quite remarkable at 415.5 ppm (parts per million) because the level was just 410.67 ppm a year ago. This is roughly equivalent to the increase in CO2 ppm between July 2016 and September 2019 (more than three years).
I have been following Mauna Loa for a while now so you see the latest readings (these are presented slightly more elegantly and so are a little behind the messy graph) and compare them to the equivalent picture revealed in 2017.
Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is supposed to result in higher global temperatures, and of course it does in the longer term, all other things being equal. The graph immediately to the right shows average world temperature as collected in several different data sets. You may think it shows a remorseless increase in global temperatures. I don't share that view. If you look at 2019 you will see the low point is at a very similar level to the previous high points, going back to the mid 1990s. In other words, it's hot but there has been no sustained increase in temperatures for two decades or more. The only exception to this was a short period two or three years ago, when even I was starting to worry about Global Warming. One striking thing about the Mauna Loa graphs (above) is that CO2 concentrations appear to have increased at the same sort of rate between 1955 (the baseline) and 1980 as they have in recent years.
Yet some climatologists describe 1940 to 1980 as a period of global cooling. In the 1970s there were stories in the press about the Earth entering another Ice Age (one is due fairly soon, at least soon in geological terms, in other words some time in the next few thousand years).It is also worth saying that all things are not equal. Climatologists seem to be mainly concerned with CO2 emissions (though to be fair they also mention deforestation and other negative environmental factors). But as well as negatives there are positives. A warmer, wetter world resulting from high atmospheric carbon levels, will also create a more favourable environment for carbon using plants and microbes. It would be reasonable for people like the environment correspondent of the BBC to cry alarm about the apparently run away increase in atmospheric CO2 but this is not what is happening at the BBC. Today's story from the Beeb is that thanks to the election of the more environmentally conscious Joe Biden as US President along with promises by China to reduce carbon emissions, a group called Climate Action Tracker has worked out that the rise in temperature by the end of the century might only be 2.1 degrees Centigrade. That seems like a lot to me, considering that so far the total warming since the beginning of the industrial age is one degree! Context is, of course, everything. As little time ago as 2013 the Guardian ran a story saying a new climate model predicted that Earth would warm 4ºC by 2100. In November 2018 Reuters reported that Global temperatures were on course to rise by 3-5ºC this century. The NASA graph comes from https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/21/why-does-the-temperature-record-shown-on-your-vital-signs-page-begin-at-1880/ You can find the Mauna Loa data at https://www.co2.earth/ Guardian article from December 2013: Planet will warm 4C by 2100 Reuters Global temperatures on track for 3-5 degrees rise Reuters has removed this link but you can find the information above right (on this web page).
	Posted by Jonathan Brind.
INDEX
Tuesday December 1, 2020