March 2024 Was the Worst Month Ever for CO2 Increases Measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.

[NNadir]

As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep spreadsheets of the of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual 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, a fact.

Facts matter.

When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.

Here's a recent post referring to weekly data:

2024's Unprecedented Terror At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory Continues.

This post refers to the monthly data.

Over the past week, there has been incredible instability in the daily readings, calling into question, to my mind, whether the issue is instrumental or a reflection of real instability owing to surges in the releases of CO₂.

I commented on that earlier this week:

Is the atmosphere momentarily too unstable to measure?

It's worrisome.

Now let's cut to the chase:

Monthly data is reported on the Mauna Loa data pages going back to March of 1958, and thus increases over the previous year are available going back to March of 1959, extending over 65 years and representing 780 months.

Of those 780 months, the increase of over March 2023 measured in March 2024 is the worst ever recorded for any month in any year, 4.38 ppm:

March 2024: 425.38 ppm
March 2023: 420.99 ppm
Last updated: Apr 05, 2024

Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2

The previous worst March to March was in 2016 compared to 2015, when the increase was 3.31 ppm.

There have been in the last 64 years only four months in which such average readings exceeded 4.00 ppm. One is this month. Another is last month (4.25 ppm higher than February 2023). The others were April of 2016, (4.16 ppm higher than April of 2015) and June of 2016 (4.01 higher than June of 2015).

A news item in the scientific journal Science suggests that the rate of heating per unit of carbon dioxide may be increasing because of changes owing to a change in the albedo of the Earth owing to improvements in the management of reflective air pollutants:

Clearer skies may be accelerating global warming

Subtitle:

Study suggests declining pollution is one cause behind decades long drop in Earth’s reflectivity

I strongly object to the use of the words "declining pollution" in the subtitle. Carbon dioxide is air pollution, and the sooner we state as much, the better. Chemical air pollution kills between six and seven million people per year; heat related air pollution derived from CO₂ and methane are killing by a different mechanism, and have been doing so for a long time.

Climate change was already killing people around the time I started writing here:

Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003 Robine et al., Comptes Rendus Biologie, 331 (2008) 2, 171-178.

Daily numbers of deaths at a regional level were collected in 16 European countries. Summer mortality was analyzed for the reference period 1998–2002 and for 2003. More than 70,000 additional deaths occurred in Europe during the summer 2003. Major distortions occurred in the age distribution of the deaths, but no harvesting effect was observed in the months following August 2003. Global warming constitutes a new health threat in an aged Europe that may be difficult to detect at the country level, depending on its size. Centralizing the count of daily deaths on an operational geographical scale constitutes a priority for Public Health in Europe.

Things are unambiguously much worse in 2024 than they were in 2003.

How many people died from radiation releases at Fukushima again?

The carbon dioxide released to power the production of on line and print selective attention, including but hardly limited to tiresome, insipid and mindless bullshit about Fukushima should disgust any ethical human being in my view.

It is very difficult to contain my anger.

There is some statistical noise in these readings, but the overall trends are clear enough, inescapable, dire, terrifying, even as they are largely ignored or swept from attention by cheap diversions:

In spite of these ever worsening and ever more astounding numbers - people lie to each other and to themselves but numbers don't lie - you will still find people mindlessly cheering for fantasies about bourgeois toys that do nothing to address climate change, be they electric cars, solar cells and/or wind turbines, all of which are exercises in promoting the use of fossil fuels, the destruction of wilderness, and the demand for mining. We also have people here and elsewhere selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," the production of hydrogen, which overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, involving exergy destruction and thus driving climate change faster along with all of the other public fantasies.

The big lie people tell themselves and each other that these pixilated reactionary schemes, electric cars, solar cells, wind turbines, hydrogen blah, blah, blah is "doing something" about climate change. This is nonsense. That it is nonsense is clearly shown, again, by the numbers. The reactionary scheme of carrying on about so called "renewable energy" that led us here was never about climate change or any other environmental issue and the claim that it is is an afterthought. It was always about attacking the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear energy.

The antinukes won and humanity, and in general, the rest of the biosphere lost.

We're clueless.

Have a swell weekend.

[True Dough]

1. Have you ever shared your thoughts

on climate-engineering, NNadir?

I'm not asking that question as if I'm naive enough to believe it could be a panacea, but if our goose is gonna be cooked by global warming like the frog in the pot of boiling water, wouldn't it be worth trying some sort of cloud brightening or some other form of solar radiation management?

[NNadir]

2. There is one, and only one, "climate engineering" tool of which I approve.

This is the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Now, to be sure, this is likely to be an extremely challenging enterprise, but it stands at the edge of feasibility - it's hardly likely but it is, to my mind, feasible.

It is often discussed in the literature in terms of "DAC" (Direct Air Capture) but I think there is a better approach, which is removal of carbon dioxide from seawater, since the concentration of carbon dioxide, bicarbonate, and carbonate is higher than in air volumetrically. Nevertheless the thermodynamic penalty is enormous, but perhaps can be addressed by process intensification using high temperature nuclear reactors. I drive this point frequently with my son who is in a Ph.D. nuclear engineering program.

This approach would address the entropy of mixing, which must be overcome to concentrate carbon dioxide, and involves the recovery of only some of the energy of putting the CO₂ there in the first place.

This leaves the problem of what to do with the carbon dioxide, which to my mind, must be reduced to carbon or carbon compounds, thus requiring reproducing all of the enthalpy of oxidation of the dangerous fossil fuels that put the CO₂ there in the first place.

In other words, future generations will be required to produce not only all of the energy they need for their lives, but all of the energy produced by previous generations, our generation included, the one history will not forgive.

This is only accessible with very high energy efficiency - exergy recovery at an unprecedented scale - and very matter with an enormous energy to mass ratio, only available in the form of the actinides thorium and uranium, and possibly, but certainly not certain, tritium and deuterium in fusion settings.

Public ignorance driven by advertising and wishful thinking resulting from that advertising makes this an enormous challenge, unprecedented in human history. I don't think we're even remotely close to facing these realities.

My opinion of all other "geoengineering" schemes is that they are all garbage and won't work and much like "solar and wind will save us" trash thinking will only serve to make things worse.

Thanks for asking.

[True Dough]

3. Story today in the Canadian media about Canada's largest carbon capture project

Sounds like there's a lot of bickering between government and industry. Hopefully this moves forward and achieves its targets.

The companies have yet to make a firm investment to advance the project over a lack of certainty from Ottawa.

The oilpatch represents the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the country and the Pathways project would be one of the largest carbon capture projects in the world. The oilsands companies are aiming for a 32 per cent reduction from 2019 emissions levels by 2030 — which is only possible if the Pathways project goes forward on time...

Oilsands companies need to start acting quickly because developing carbon capture facilities at this scale will take time and the world is increasingly focused on low-carbon sources of energy, said Raoul LeBlanc, a vice president with S&P Global Commodity Insights.

"It's got a real advantage versus the Permian Basin in Texas which has around 60,000 Individual oil well sites spread over a large area. The oilsands sector has a lot of emissions, but they're very concentrated," he said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bakx-pathways-oilsands-wilkinson-ccfd-itc-1.7163777

[NNadir]

4. From my perspective, just like Norway's Sleipner project, it may as well come out of the advertising budget.

To my mind, all "sequestration" projects are nothing more than that, advertising to greenwash fossil fuels.

Sliepner was announced as a sequestration project in 1996. It's probably "sequestered" a few million tons of CO2 over two decades on a planet which has been releasing about 35 billion tons a year (probably a low estimate) for decades.

Sliepner is for show, and nothing else.

Here they are, crowing, in defiance of all decency about having "sequestered" one million tons: Sleipner partnership releases CO2 storage data.

To anyone with a sense of the numbers, it's positively absurd.

It falls into the same category as hydrogen, an exercise that wastes energy for no purpose other than advertising.

The way to deal with the problem is to ban fossil fuels. Nothing else is worth discussing to my mind.

[True Dough]

5. This one is for you, NNadir

Probably nothing you don't already know, but I spotted it today and thought of you immediately:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-energy-producers/

France and China are practically neck and neck after the U.S.!

[NNadir]

6. China Built 53 Nuclear Reactors in the 21st century, 3 in the 20th, and now has an additional 26 under construction.

They have a nuclear manufacturing infrastructure that rivals that of the United States in the 1970s.

Unlike the Western World, they have a very real shot at addressing the contribution of climate change of their country. Within 10 years, they will be the world's largest producer of nuclear energy.

Nuclear Reactors in China

The building of a nuclear construction infrastructure is a tremendous engineering achievement which benefits all of humanity. It may be true that China is the most coal dependent nation in the world, but they're doing something about it.