May 2011 (Scripps) CO2 Concentration: 394.16ppm

Oops, it turns out I never published this post back in early June when I wrote it.  I’m going to publish June’s data later today.

An average of 394.16ppm CO2 concentration was measured at Scripps’ Mauna Loa, Hawai’i’s  Observatory during May 2011.  Normally, I report on the NOAA observation, but it hasn’t been updated yet this month.  When they do, I’ll update this post.  The rest of this post will compare Scripps data against Scripps data – not Scripps versus NOAA.

That value is the highest in recorded history.  Last year’s 393.22 was the previous highest May value ever recorded.  This year’s value is 1.13ppm higher than May 2010.

The yearly maximum monthly value normally occurs during May.  The 394.16 concentration is therefore likely to be the highest value reported this year.

This will likely be the last year that CO2 concentrations will fall below 390ppm during any calendar month.  The aggressive march toward 400ppm continues.  Keep in mind that scientists have recommended that 350ppm should be the target for which humanity should aim in order to keep climate extremes from overwhelming our civilization.

Economic Short-Sightedness & The Environment: Canadian Tar Sands Oil

Among other energy-related news, Canadian tar sands oil has maintained a relatively low profile, even in American environmental circles.  That’s dangerously short-sighted.  As I’ve argued against overt climate change denialism, it seems some groups closer to my worldview need some education and encouragement to do the correct thing.

The U.S. State Department apparently has been working to alleviate concerns of parties in Canada interested in transporting tar sands oil from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.  This wouldn’t change the balance of what gets processed in the U.S. very much, but one of the arguments for doing this would be to decrease the amount of oil processed from unstable regions (i.e. the Middle East).  The U.S. State Department, in 2009, helped work on this and other messaging for pro-dirty energy interests.  That would be the Obama State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton.  Obama has taken some actions which can be characterized as good in dealing with the threat of climate change.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the only action he’s taken which can be characterized as bad.

Additional parties deserve to be called out:

Yet pressure to approve the Keystone XL addition is high. Its supporters in Congress and industry — it also has the support of the AFL-CIO and Teamsters union — estimate that it would create more than 300,000 American jobs, reduce dependence on crude oil from unstable or hostile governments and push down gasoline prices.

This economically-based short-sightedness is appalling.  I’ll ask the AFL-CIO and Teamsters (groups I generally support, by the way) the same question I’ve asked climate change deniers: when global ecosystems collapse as a result of our heat-trapping pollution, do they really think they’re going to be worried about job availability?  Our societies and civilization are at stake – the foundations upon which jobs exist.  Without those, jobs, either union or not, won’t matter.  We’ll be far more concerned with simple day-to-day survival problems such as locating fresh water and having enough food to eat.

I understand the desire to push for good jobs.  People today live in the societies of today, and ours isn’t one that is inclined to share power with the lower and middle classes.  However, the unions themselves deserve additional examination of what candidates they supported in the past that were all to willing to undercut their interests once in office, much as Obama has done.

If the tar sands oil, which requires burning natural gas to drill for, by the way, is burned, CO2 concentrations will jump from today’s 390ppm to over 600ppm.  That doesn’t include any other source of heat-trapping pollution – that’s only considering tar sands oil.  600ppm will produce a world which is unlivable by a majority of today’s species, mostly because of the time-scale over which we jump to 600ppm (see my recent blog post about CO2 concentrations and the PETM).  The thought that pro-worker groups would be willing to trade 300,000 jobs in the next handful of years that would help contribute to an unlivable planet in the next few centuries makes my stomach turn.

State of the Poles – July 2011: Arctic At Record Low; Antarctic Below Average

The state of global polar sea ice area nearing the middle of July 2011 has gotten much worse than at the beginning of June: well below climatological conditions (1979-2009) continue to persist.

Sea ice in the Arctic continues to track significantly below average, with the 2nd to lowest readings for the month (depending on the day) in the modern era.  Weather conditions around Antarctica caused a temporary stall in sea ice freezing, causing extent conditions to tack toward below average conditions before recently recovering somewhat.  Global sea ice area therefore took a turn for the worse during June and early July, reaching for historical lows reached only a couple of times before now.  Within the last month, global sea ice area reversed the gains made in May toward eliminating the deficit from climatological conditions that characterized the first four months of 2011 and has instead declined rapidly to a 2 million sq. km. deficit by early July.

To help put this in context, only three previous times in recent history have seen conditions as bad as they are today: in 2007, 2008 and 2010.  The difference between these previous occurrences and current conditions is profound: they previously occurred around September, when Arctic ice reached its annual minima.  This, of course, is July.  There are over two months left before melting in the Arctic stops.  Will a new record low sea ice area be recorded this year?  Stay tuned.

Climate Change Basics – Gases, Forcing & Surface Temperature

After running across some resources again recently, I thought it would be a good idea to put some posts together that showed the background of many of the common facts I discuss.  In this first post, I wanted to show the relationship between greenhouse gases, radiative forcing and temperatures.  In doing, I will use graphics from the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report Technical Summary.

First, here is a graphic of changes in greenhouse gases from ice core and modern observational data, spanning the time period of 20,000 years ago through current:

The portion of this graph I’d like to focus on is the upper left quadrant displaying the time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.  First, note is the transition from ~180ppm 20,000 years ago to between 260 and 280ppm.  This transition helped bring the last interglacial period to an end.  Of greater import is the more recent transition from 280ppm to 380ppm (as of ~2005; current concentrations are ~390ppm).