A New Record Concentration for CO2, 426.35 ppm Has Been Set at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.

I have just deleted an earlier post on the new record since the Mauna Loa Observatory has revised the data since yesterday.

Earlier this morning the readings were as follows:

Week beginning on March 31, 2024: 426.71 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.64 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.97 ppm
Last updated: April 06, 2024

The data has been revised during the time I was writing the earlier post

The revised data, still shows a record for all time, but the increase over week 13 of 2023 is not quite as large, and not in the top 50 of all time, although still disturbing. (See Below)

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.

Yesterday in another post I noted that March 2024 was the absolute worst month ever recorded with respect to increases over the previous year's average readings:

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

We now have the highest concentration ever recorded for a weekly average reading at the Observatory:

Week beginning on March 31, 2024: 426.35 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.64 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.97 ppm

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

I've been at this for a long time, and I've never seen anything quite like the beginning of 2024, and the shock continues week after week of this year.

We are in the 13th week of 2024.

The increase over week 13 of 2023 is 3.71 ppm.

Week 5 (5.75 ppm higher than week 5 of 2023), week 7( 5.53 ppm higher than week 7 of 2023) , and week 10 (5.66 ppm higher than week 10 of 2023,) represent three of only four such week to week comparators with readings of the previous year to exceed a 5.00 ppm increase. The only other such an increase to exceed 5.00 ppm occurred in 2016, the previous "worst year ever" in CO2 accumulations, 5.04 ppm recorded in the week beginning July 31, 2016, week 28 when compared with week 28 of 2015.

The year is still young.

Of the top 50 highest readings of the difference between weeks of the year with those of the previous year out of the 2514 such data points, 15 have taken place in the last 5 years, 35 in the last 10 years, and 44 in this century. Of the six readings from the 20th century, four occurred in 1998, when huge stretches of the Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests caught fire when slash and burn fires designed to add palm oil plantations to satisfy the demand for "renewable" biodiesel for German cars and trucks as part of their "renewable energy portfolio" went out of control.

One of the other two readings of the 20th century, those not in 1998, to appear in the list of the 50 worst such increases is now the 49th highest, 3.79 ppm recorded during the week beginning 1/24/1999. The other reading from the 20th century to appear in the top 50 comparators with that of the previous year beginning 8/21/1988, (3.91 ppm over the same week of 1987, week 34) was the worst such week ever for ten years, until 1998. It is now the 31st worst such week ever recorded.

Since the first week of the year 2000, the week beginning January 2 of that year, the increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the collapsing planetary atmosphere has been 57.65 ppm.

Since I joined DU in late November 2022, when, then as now, the main issue on my mind is the relationship between energy and the environment, the increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 has been 53.78 ppm.

In my tenure at DU, during which I have been a tireless advocate for nuclear energy, right through the big exceedingly stupid brouhaha about Fukushima, where deaths from seawater approached 20,000 and deaths from radiation are vanishingly small, if extant at all. Since the Tohoku earthquake that destroyed a city where nuclear reactors were situated, the concentration of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide has risen by 33.97 ppm.

And let's be clear, climate change kills people, threatening far more coast cities with inundation with seawater than the city destroyed (by seawater) during the Tohoku earthquake.

In reaction to these obscene numbers, I've heard endlessly from people for whom I have no intellectual, moral, scientific, professional or educational respect, all about Chernobyl, and then about Fukushima, as if these fucking trivial events matter in comparison to an entire planet in flames. The appalling indecency of these tiresome, if popular, fools, to my mind, is on a Trumpian scale:

The number of people killed by air pollution at a rate of 6 to 7 million people per year since Chernobyl in April of 1986 is between 230 million and 270 million human beings; since March of 2011, the death toll from the same cause, air pollution, has been between 80 and 90 million human beings since the disgusting distraction obsession with Fukushima began, continuing right up to this day, working to advance the use of dangerous fossil fuels, about which the mindless antinuke community of intellectual and moral Lilliputians could not care less. These death tolls do not include the vast death tolls associated with climate change, extreme weather, heat stroke, etc...

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249)

Climate change was already killing people with heat exposure 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.



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

Some other stuff I say while reporting on this 2024 disaster, the one going under the radar while we all whine and carry on about things other than a planet in flames, our planet:



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.

A new wrinkle I've just observed here is the same fossil fuel salespeople who prattle on mindlessly and exceedingly dishonestly about rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen" (with exergy destruction) are now carrying on about "geoengineering." There's nothing surprising about this, the fossil fuel industry is very good at manufacturing dishonest distractions while pretending to be "green," and, worse, having people buy into the bullshit they handout.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Even Exxon has joined the distraction show in pretending to give a shit about climate change. Clearly they don't; never have and never will.

The big lie people tell themselves and each other, egged on by fossil fuel interests, that these pixilated reactionary schemes, electric cars, solar cells, wind turbines, hydrogen, "geoengineering," sequestration 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.

Up to the present, there has never been anything quite like 2024, again, a young year, but the really scary thought is that in the future 2024 might seem ordinary.

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

We're clueless.

Enjoy the rest of Sunday.