News Brief by Kip Hansen — 30 November 2022
The latest news from Hawai’i from The Washington Post:
“The eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, has interrupted a key site that monitors greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, officials said Tuesday.
“The carbon dioxide measurement equipment that maintains the famed Keeling Curve record lost power at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 28 and is not currently recording data,” the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in a statement.”
The Post quotes Keeling’s son:
“It’s a big eruption, and it’s in a bad place,” Keeling’s son, Scripps geoscientist Ralph Keeling, said in a statement Tuesday about the lava flows at Mauna Loa, located at the heart of Hawaii’s Big Island. He described the outlook for future CO2 readings from the station as “very troubling.”
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Author’s Comment:
Time will tell whether the observatory survives the latest eruption.
Many reading here already understand that CO2 is not the control knob of Earth’s climate but rather has a small effect on the climate as it is a small part of the overall Greenhouse Effect that keep the Earth warm enough for life.
While it would be a shame to lose the continuity of the Keeling Curve data base, it will not end the international [sociopathic] effort to banish fossil fuels.
Thanks for reading.
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WHAT??? No self-sufficient power back-up at all? You would think that they could at least have installed Solar Panels to provide emergency power during outages…..of course if they had a DIESEL or GASOLINE or PROPANE powered GENERATOR with a fuel storage tank on site, they would still be taking measurements.
Including higher CO2 readings due to the exhausts? Even car traffic is limited in the neighborhood of the observatory to prevent interference with the measurements…
At the South Pole they have frequent problems with readings, when the wind blows from the exhausts of the generators and when taking flask samples that must be done upwind of the people that take the samples, not easy with temperatures around -60 C and below…
I found this article very interesting….your mileage may vary.
“The lack of deviation in the Mauna Loa CO2 curve is a proxy for a stable ocean current, i.e. no slowdown of for example the Gulf Stream.”
https://www.newscats.org/the-enormity-of-ignorance/
That web site makes the same error as too many before: the CO2 exchanges between the atmosphere and the deep oceans is a cycle and a cycle may double or may halve, it will not have any effect on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere…
Only the difference between ins and outs will have an effect on CO2 levels.
The calculated cycle (based on the 13C level changes) is about 40 PgC/year with slightly more sink than source of about 2 PgC/year…
Even if MLO was operational , they would be binning all the data because it was contiminated by CO2 from the volcano. There will be a gap in the data and it won’t be the first one. Allegedly all the data from 1964 was invented to fill a gap when monitoring was temporarily defunded. There are many shorter breaks in the daily data series due data being removed as unreliable.
Apart from wind direction bringing contamination from the volcano, there is a 2 std dev. cut-off where any variations are removed regardless. When I studied this data it seems they were removing natural variation as “outliers” on this basis.
It would seem to me that they should probably use a higher cutoff of 3 or 4 SD unless it starts to resemble a bimodal distribution after only 2 SD.
Higher CO2 causes more eruptions. There is an undeniable correlation !