Monday May 6th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Crossing The 415 Parts Per Million Threshold
Well here we are…again. It has not been long since I first reported that the carbon reading from Mauna Loa, Hawaii had crossed above 410 parts per million. The rate of rise with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remains at roughly 2.5 parts per million per year with not much of a real slowdown since I began harping on the climate crisis since 1989. Here are some of the latest findings and sad notes:
Our friend Bill McKibben and his organization think that carbon needs to settle back to 350 parts per million in order to stabilize the climate. Preindustrial conditions were below 300 parts per million with most scientists agreeing that this figure was around 280 parts per million. The higher the reading gets from Mauna Loa and other measuring sites the lesser humanities’ ability and chances will be for not getting affected by tipping point factors, sending the climate spiraling into deadly warmth. Don’t forget that there is lag time between a certain high level of carbon in the atmosphere and associated warm effects in association with the Earth climate system. I have some posts on each of the factors here:
https://guyonclimate.com/category/climate-tipping-factors/
Obviously I am truly disappointed that my fellow man has not at least kept carbon at bay in the atmosphere, moving more rapidly towards totally green economies. I fear that what is now termed as “negative emissions” will be necessary to stabilize the climate, entailing methods to draw carbon out of the air, and I’m not writing about plants. Machines have been invented to do this, but they require power, which will be in short supply from any burgeoning green source. Adding chemicals to the ocean and atmosphere to do the trick may prove to be more harmful than doing nothing.
Not doing anything, though, will most certainly lead to what the New York times broke today on species loss:
The bottom line again here is that we need a World War Two mentality worldwide to stop the rise of CO2 levels, but I just don’t see this coming from most countries, especially the United States. Oh well, I will wash, rinse, then repeat this post when we see 420 parts per million in a couple of years. Sigh…
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Here is some more weather and climate news from Monday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”