Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t ivankinsman – did anyone else notice the end of the world?
Greenhouse gas reaches alarming new record
By Brandon Miller, CNN
Updated 1626 GMT (0026 HKT) May 3, 2018
(CNN) Carbon dioxide (CO2), the No. 1 greenhouse gas leading to man-made global warming, has reached a dubious new milestone.
The level of the gas in the atmosphere, which is measured by instruments on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, topped 410 parts per million (ppm) for the month of April.
This is the highest concentration of the heat-trapping gas ever recorded at the Observatory, where direct measurements have been taking place for more than 60 years, giving us the longest detailed record.
Passing 410 ppm “is important because it punctuates another milestone in the upwards march of CO2,” according to Ralph Keeling, head of the Scripps CO2 program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
“At the recent pace, we’ll hit 450 ppm in a mere 16 years, and 500 ppm 20 years after that. That’s well within dangerous territory for the climate system,” Keeling added.
…
Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/03/us/dangerous-co2-record-wxc/index.html?no-st=1525552305
The main danger of course is that when CO2 hits 500ppm and nothing bad happens, people will finally stop listening to wild claims of imminent catastrophe.
Of course, we all hoped that the climate movement would collapse when CO2 hit 400ppm – but as the 50th anniversary of futurist Paul Ehrlich’s failure to lose his audience demonstrates, it will likely take a lot more than half a century of being wrong to convince the most committed climate advocates that they might be mistaken.
Worrall will now present the list of climate scientists that said the world would end at 400 ppm….
Worrall created his own strawman and burnt it down. Little boys do that sort of stuff.
Donald: Please explain 350.org, and Worrall’s role in that. Of course, there may not be any climate scientist at 350.org. You did get the “strawman” thing right, but Worrall had no part in stuffing this scarecrow. Pretty sure the “350” group made predictions about 400 minus 50 ppm, maybe you should look them up, or are you a charter member? Little boys do all sorts of stuff, but mostly we laugh when you big boys show your stuff.
Given the loss of global ice over the last 4 decades and the fact that local heat records are outpacing local cold records at a ration in excess of 3:1, etc., etc., this bit of nonsense is the logical equivalent of “Sure, that outlet is hot and smoking, but the house hasn’t burned down yet so there’s nothing to be concerned about.”
Yer right,it is unprecedented.
The world has never been so warm.
Funny thing though, who placed that village under the ice?
How did that goldmine of Roman vintage get under there?
What kind of faker would bury a forrest under a glacier?
Not to mention those incredible Vikings digging nice 6ft graves in permafrost.
And who was the con artist that placed a “petrified” forrest on Axel Heiberg Island.?
Hand over all your possessions and flee,be very very frightened..
Enjoy.
Extrapolating a small region as representative of the global climate is hardly valid, but, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that the uncovered village is representative. Given that, what has occurred is that 1700 years of glacial growth has been erased in less than 40 years; and there’s the rub. The magnitude of the change in global temperatures is not the primary concern, it is the rate. A degree or two of temperature increase is not a threat to life on earth, although it is to specific species, rather it is the economic threat of an artificially rapid global temperature change that is the concern. The mitigation costs of rising coastal waters, shifts in agricultural regions, increased tropical disease regions, etc. occurring in a few decades, rather than over centuries, will be huge.
For a while, back in the 1990’s, it did indeed seem to me that that was the argument the global-warmers were making:
I.e. that the potential changes would actually be quite manageable if they didn’t happen too quickly. But the hymn-sheet seemed to change rapidly when it became apparent that temperatures were not changing rapidly enough for it to be considered a problem by the standards they had set themselves.
After that, they seemed to spend more time focusing on polar regions, which can and do change quite rapidly, even if the causes are entirely natural and have also happened completely naturally in the recent past. As you note, such regions are not at all representative of the whole planet. The difference between the winter snows melting completely, or not melting completely, is enormous. You can soon find yourself under a thick layer of ice, or vice-versa, if the regional climate changes only slightly.
The more disingenuous among the climate sorority are also very well aware that a polar-region average winter temperature change from, say, -40 Celsius to -30 Celsius really doesn’t mean much for life in general, simply because there locally isn’t much life in general. But for those same profoundly dishonest “scientists”, it is a great opportunity to scream about “the Arctic is screaming”.
Slipstick, shouldn’t we be able to see this “threat” already in the sea level rise, even a little bit?
The rise is so slow, mankind will slink out of the way easily, and that is IF it even happens. The temperature of the Holocene is headed in one direction, and that is down, eventually. Enjoy this epoch while it is here.
Slipstick: So 40 yrs ago was1978. Before 1978, according to you, the glaciers grew for 1700 years. Have I got that right? No glacial retreat from 318AD until 1978? And you accuse Felix of not reading? And don’t bother with the “it’s the rate” crap until you acknowledge there WAS a rate before 1978, then we’ll talk.
The real alleged ration up to 2009 was 2:1, but it’s a meaningless, worse than worthless metric:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/why-the-record-high-to-record-low-ratio-is-junk-science/
Ratio.
Besides which, of course, NOAA is cooking the books in a variety of ways. In addition to outright f@aud via “adjustments”, they’ve rejected many older high records for various bogus excuses.
Slipstick May 6, 2018 at 2:59 pm
Glaciers have been retreating, net, since the end of the LIA. It has nothing to do with man-made CO2. While perhaps half of glaciers are retreating, others are staying put and many advancing. Hence, CO2 can’t be the cause, since it’s supposedly well mixed in the atmosphere.
Mountain glaciers are a tiny percentage of the total ice on earth, which is actually increasing in mass, thanks to the growth of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains the vast majority of ice on earth.
Felix,
Again, I’m talking about rates and, by the way, it’s significantly more than half of the glaciers that are retreating. Regarding Antarctica, I am guessing you’re referring to Zwally and others 2015. While this is certainly a fine paper, it is the only recent significant paper to reach the published conclusions and there are some issues regarding the methodology, such as the assumed firn/ice density and the reference surface. Whether the conclusions regarding the East Antarctic sheet are valid or not, Zwally’s team also pointed out that if losses elsewhere in the Antarctic continue to increase as they have, they will overtake any gains in the east in the next few decades; something I’ll bet you didn’t read when you read about the paper.
Sli[,
Of course I read that. Naturally they had to say that to get published. The WAIS is insignificant compared to the EAIS, and to the extent that it is losing mass, it’s because of subglacial volcanism, not CO2. There has been cooling on Antarctica, not warming.
And other recent studies have also found the EAIS gaining mass. As would be expected, since there has been no warming at all at the South Pole.
No worldwide survey of glaciers has been conducted, so your belief that over half are retreating is just a guess. The fact that glaciers are advancing as well as retreating on every continent should give you reason to rethink your guess. The best publicized instances of retreat prove to be not due to CO2 but to other processes, including some man-made, as with the deforestation of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Here are a few of the many prominent growing glaciers:
https://iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm
While not up to date, these glaciers are still growing.
If CO2 were causing glaciers to recede, what caused them to do so between 1710 (after the Maunder Minimum lows of the LIA) and 1940, and why aren’t they all retreating now? Why was the world colder from 1940 to 1977, under increasing CO2, than before 1940, under low CO2?
Slip,
And I should add that if anywhere on Earth ought to show a GHE from more CO2, it would be the South Pole, which has very little H2O in its air.
Yet, zip, zilch, nada, no effect from 120 ppm more CO2 at all.
The loss of ice over 4 decades is no greater than the loss over the previous 10 decades.
That the world has warmed since the bottom of the little ice age is not in contention.
As to your claim that record highs are out pacing record lows by 3:1, I call BS on that. It isn’t happening.
Regardless, the world is still cooler than it was during the Mideval, Roman and Minoan warm periods, when CO2 levels were lower than they are today.
The world is way cooler than it was during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the world is cooler than it has been for over 90% of the last 10K years.
Your desire to believe that there is anything unusual, much less alarming about the mild warming of the last 150 years would be amusing the actions of your fellow alarmists hadn’t resulted in the deaths of 10’s of thousands over the last few years.
Scripps also measure CO2 at Point Barrow, La Jolla, Christmas Island, American Samoa, the South Pole and several other places listed here http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2/sampling_stations
The Christmas Island, American Samoa, the South Pole stations show much less seasonal variation than the Muana Loa station. They are still well short of the 410ppm milestone.
The La Jolla and Point Barrow stations show much more seasonal variation – and they surpassed 410ppm a couple of years ago. http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/other_stations/global_stations_co2_concentration_trends
You have 10,000 people and 4 of them are Canadian. Oh, we are all going to suffocate to death!
All is well, and getting better all the time.
Um are we still measuring Co2 via Hawaii? Its sort of a mess there at the moment 🙂
Try to get unmodified raw data from the Keeling folks. They are protecting their namesakes legacy.
Did I notice the rise in CO2? I live in a Tropical Savannah region in Central Queensland. Historically, this was a small town with a major water shortage. Very marginal.
I put in giant water tanks at the end of the last dry spell. They have been full since. Year on year, my grass is greener. I now have a small rainforest at the back of the house block. Vegetable gardens now grow where none would grow before. That’s just me.
My town is now a city, with heavy industry unconstrained by water. The trees are growing like crazy. The city is green and lush. The birds, snakes, possums, kangaroos,dolphins, giant turtles,.fish and other stuff just love it.
Have I noticed a rise in CO2 levels? My oath, on this marginal land it has resulted in huge changes. More please.
My town in all that time has grown under the shadow a very big coal power station and a massive coal port. The wild life love it.
The mid-Atlantic of the USA is turning into a deciduous jungle. When I was a child, we could walk through older forests of oak, popular, and the beach coming in (pines long gone). Now, the holly and other under-story makes it difficult. The pollen has becoming nearly unbearable and gets worse every year.
Aren’t the volcanos in Hawaii erupting right now?
Climate improvement is becoming noticeable here in the Netherlands. Probably we should not strive for more than 1,000 ppm (arbitrary number) unless required to postpone the inevitable ice age and just to make sure the atmosphere does not change too much from the present state. We have a lot of time before we even get close to come up with a smart alternative for the current carbon way of life, the current green alternatives are pretty thin to say the least
Let’s chart it against global GDP and global flight miles.
In the late 1980’s, I visited a national park visitor center on the side of Mt. Rainier, called “Paradise”. The thing that impressed me most was the speed at which the evergreens grew in the power line right-of-ways. Who is going to pay for this tree cutting at 800 ppm?
Finally, someone has identified a real problem caused by CO2 emissions!
So that’s why I have to mow the grass again. Curse you CO2!!!
Serious question- Isn’t Hawaii a volcanic island with many active volcanoes spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at all times? How would that be an appropriate place to make an accurate measurement of atmospheric CO2? Just sayin’ is all…….