Carbon dioxide levels hit 50% higher than pre-industrial times

Written by Andy Rowlands on June 11, 2021. Posted in Current News

The Associated Press in America carried a article a few days ago proclaiming the imminent climate catastrophe now atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution began.

Seth Borenstein, who Tony Heller has repeatedly noted used to report accurately on the climate, is now a fully-fledged member of the alarmist fraternity.

In the AP article on the 7th June, he writes:

The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50 percent higher than when the industrial age began.

And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50 percent higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans.

Carbon dioxide levels peak every May just before plant life in the Northern Hemisphere blossoms, sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere and into flowers, leaves, seeds and stems. The reprieve is temporary, though, because emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas for transportation and electricity far exceed what plants can take in, pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.

“Reaching 50 percent higher carbon dioxide than preindustrial is really setting a new benchmark and not in a good way,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the research. “If we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we need to work much harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and right away.”

Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather — storms, wildfires, floods and droughts — worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen. In 2015, countries signed the Paris agreement to try to keep climate change to below what’s considered dangerous levels.

The one-year jump in carbon dioxide was not a record, mainly because of a La Nina weather pattern, when parts of the Pacific temporarily cool, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling. Keeling’s father started the monitoring of carbon dioxide on top of the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Loa in 1958, and he has continued the work of charting the now famous Keeling Curve.

Scripps, which calculates the numbers slightly differently based on time and averaging, said the peak in May was 418.9.

Also, pandemic lockdowns slowed transportation, travel and other activity by about 7 percent, earlier studies show. But that was too small to make a significant difference. Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 1,000 years or more, so year-to-year changes in emissions don’t register much.

The 10-year average rate of increase also set a record, now up to 2.4 parts per million per year.

“Carbon dioxide going up in a few decades like that is extremely unusual,” Tans said. “For example, when the Earth climbed out of the last ice age, carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million and it took the Earth system, the natural system, 6,000 years. We have a much larger increase in the last few decades.”

By comparison, it has taken only 42 years, from 1979 to 2021, to increase carbon dioxide by that same amount.

“The world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research.

It seems stupidity has reached a new low.

‘global heat-trapping carbon dioxide‘

As usual, alarmists do not understand, or more likely ignore, the laws of thermodynamics so ably described on PSI by Joe Postma, that prohibits CO2 from trapping heat.

‘sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere‘

Yet again confusing carbon and carbon dioxide.

‘pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.‘

I for one am glad carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. It is making Earth more healthy. Even NASA admits the increasing CO2 is greening the planet, but that is apparently bad news.

It is often said by the media that CO2 and the Earth’s temperature have never been higher. This is pure nonsense, as the illustration below proves.

Image: Geocraft

We can see that for much of the last 600 million years, the average temperature of the planet was 22C. Today the average is 12C. We can also see that our paltry 419ppm of CO2 is dwarfed by historic concentrations. So far from CO2 and the temperature never being higher, we are currently in the joint coldest period, with the lowest CO2, of the last half billion years, matching the conditions in the Carboniferous and Permian epochs 300 million years ago.

‘Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather — storms, wildfires, floods and droughts — worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic‘

Err…no it does not. In one of my email exchanges with Dr Tim Ball, he explained how a warmer world produces LESS bad weather not more. He said that storms:

“…occur along the boundary between the cold air dome over the polar regions and the warm tropical air of the atmosphere. This is generally known as the Polar Front and occupies the middle latitudes between 30° and 65°. As you correctly note, the intensity of the storm is determined by the temperature difference across that Polar Front. Also, as you correctly note the IPCC claim storms will increase in numbers and intensity with global warming. In fact, there is more warming in the polar region. This will reduce the temperature difference and thus the number and intensity of storms.”

As for making the oceans more acidic, this is yet another climate myth. The oceans have a pH of between 7.9 and 8.3, which makes them an alkaline.

You cannot increase the acidity of something that is not an acid to start with.

Also, the pH scale is logarithmic like the Richter Scale, so each number is ten times the previous number. Therefore, to make seawater even the mildest acid, the pH level would have to decrease by a factor of 20.

The oceans have been gradually rising as long as we have been measuring them, a natural consequence of the planet continuing to recover from the last ice age.

The number of wildfires have decreased dramatically over the last century, as this illustration Gregory Wrightstone produced shows:

The illustration also reveals how the IPCC chose only data from the low point in 1984 for their Fourth National Climate Assessment, to show an increase in the number of wildfires. This is a deliberate deception.

The area of ground burnt has increased, but this is mainly due to the reduction, and even total cessation in some places, of forest management practices.

The image below shows the claim and the reality of the climate system.

This AP article is pure propaganda intended to create a fear of the natural world, and make people afraid of the weather. Disgraceful.

See more here: apnews.com

Header image: NOAA

About the author: Andy Rowlands is a university graduate in space science and British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘

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