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Earth

Heat-Trapping CO2, Methane Levels In the Air Last Year Spiked To Record Highs (apnews.com) 81

Posted by BeauHD from the not-what-we-like-to-see dept.
According to the latest data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces. The Associated Press reports: Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade. The 2.8 parts per million increase in carbon dioxide airborne levels from January 2023 to December, wasn't as high as the jumps were in 2014 and 2015, but they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise records started. Carbon dioxide's average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.

Last year's methane's jump of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin "Lindsay" Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations. [...] The third biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as those in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the EPA.
"Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said."
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Heat-Trapping CO2, Methane Levels In the Air Last Year Spiked To Record Highs More

Heat-Trapping CO2, Methane Levels In the Air Last Year Spiked To Record Highs

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  • Keep in mind... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @09:14PM (#64373842)

    These are net increases, indicating that however much Mother Nature is sequestering, we're directly or indirectly releasing that much PLUS this much.

    By the way, we're about 1/3 of the way to the point at which CO2 concentrations have a noticeable effect on human cognition outdoors. Typically we consider anything under 1000ppm indoors acceptable, but that top end is the starting range of issues... and indoor concentrations can only decrease by mixing with outdoor concentrations. This means we're already dangerously close to having indoor air quality issues that make us measurably dumber.

    We're going to have to actively filter our indoor air or exchange it a hell of a lot faster than we usually do if we want to avoid that, and this is only going to get worse.

    • Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by galabar ( 518411 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @09:32PM (#64373856)
      I think your math is off. If we assume pre-industrial levels of CO2 at 280 ppm, we've increased to 420 ppm. So, around 100 ppm. So, we have an increase of 420 ppm - 280 ppm = 140 ppm. If we are to increase from 280 ppm to 1000 pm, that would be 720 ppm increase, of which we have increased 140 ppm. So, we are about 140/720 = 0.19 (or 19%) of the way to 1000 pmm of human increase in the CO2 level. So, 1/5 of the way there, not 1/3.

      • You know what? I have tried to reconstruct where I went wrong and I have no freaking clue. It's not a decimal slip, which is my nemesis. I think maybe logic went completely out the window and I thought a 50% gain was 1/3 of the current total and then just stopped thinking. ...Can I blame indoor CO2 concentrations?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by galabar ( 518411 )
          It's definitely the CO2 concentration. :) On the bright side, plants love CO2 and we've been able to feed the world at the current PPM. Of course, more feed means more people mean more CO2... So, your guess at a solution is as good as mine... :)

          • Re:Keep in mind... (Score:5, Informative)

            by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @10:18PM (#64373912)

            "On the bright side, plants love CO2 and we've been able to feed the world at the current PPM"
            ah, the old CO2 is plant food argument

            https://apnews.com/article/fac... [apnews.com]

            “Carbon dioxide is plant food. But they’re missing all the nuance,” said Kristie Ebi, a co-author of the Lancet study and a professor of global health at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment.

            The key point of the study was that while a higher concentration of carbon dioxide did increase plant growth in 85% of plants, it ultimately lowered their nutritional value, which is not a worthwhile trade-off for the planet, Ebi said. “There’s about 830 million people in the world who are food insecure. There’s about 2 billion that are micronutrient deficient,” said Ebi.

            • Thank you!
              Irakli Loladze. I've been searching for this guy's name for a month now...

              Another thing to note is that those minerals are replaced by sugars, meaning we're actually growing junk food.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gtall ( 79522 )

            You know what also likes high CO2 concentration? Arctic tundra and Antarctica glaciers. They just want to be free. The former will cause a feed-forward effect for CO2 and methane, the latter will cause oceans to rise. And the increased temperature will cause more desertification. So what you may gain in plant happiness you will lose to desert. Learn to think in terms of systems, not one-offs that you like.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Plants love CO2 like people love sugar, and the affects are similar. Yes, more growth, along with less health.
            Now, if you can increase the other vital nutrients, that increase in size might not be so bad. Unluckily, increasing CO2 also has a habit of increasing acidity, which interferes with nutrient take up depending on soil.

    • Wetlands, eh? So now we got to worry not only about bites but also mosquito farts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        No, just the mosquitos. It turns out they Really like warm temperatures. So much in fact the are moving out of their tropical paradises into the subtropical zones. And they bring their buddies such as dengue fever and host of other maladies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Typically we consider anything under 1000ppm indoors acceptable, but that top end is the starting range of issues... and indoor concentrations can only decrease by mixing with outdoor concentrations. This means we're already dangerously close to having indoor air quality issues that make us measurably dumber.

      The 1,000 ppm indoor target is a surrogate for other indoor pollutants, from assumptions of how much carbon dioxide is produced by each person and rates of indoor pollution generation, used to gauge wh

    • Our leaders are hell-bent on taking on taking us straight to hell. WTF? Vote Biden! He will stop all of this nonsense. He is so much better than Trump. Let's keep doing what we have always been doing.

      If we are definitely going to hell in a handbasket, I choose the handbasket that fucks us all the most. I will vote for Trump.

      Think of how fucked up things have to be in order to make utter immediate destruction more preferable than a slow suffocating death.

    • Including 150 thousand tonnes (330 million pounds) of methane that we pretend to not know that the US released from the NordStream pipelines (26 September 2022)

  • And quit crying about it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And please stop cutting them down, for any reason.

      • You don’t even need to plant trees. As soon as people stop farming, trees come up like weeds. Tree cover in Europe has increased enormously since the fall of communism.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          The fires are killing them. And I don't mean just the burning, the Canadian fires last year resulted in a world wide forest reduction of a few percent.
          https://www.timescolonist.com/... [timescolonist.com]
          And this year is looking worse for fires judging by the lack of snow pack.

    • Build more nuclear fission power plants and quit worrying about global warming. Given some recent news announcements on plans to build more nuclear power around the world it appears that people are finally getting serious about global warming as a threat.

      Given the magnitude of the CO2 in the air, and the existing abundance of plant life around the world, I have my doubts that any effort to plant trees to lower CO2 emissions would have much success. We should absolutely plant trees because trees do so much

  • Perma Frost (Score:3)

    by betsuin ( 5812894 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @10:01PM (#64373888)
    "Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much the energy industry, Lan said."

    Well the above observation does not bode well.
    Feed back loop anyone?

  • "3rd highest in 65 years of reporting"! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davide marney ( 231845 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @10:17PM (#64373910) Journal

    The geologists in the room are laughing at you, not with you. Deservedly so.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheStatsMan ( 1763322 )

      We'll be standing on the crusted desert of what was once farm land and people will still be saying, "Yeah but we don't actually know how hot it was in the Triassic."

      • Realistically, we should be looking at deviations from the anticipated climate of the current interglacial period had humans not started affecting it. Our climate should have continued to be relatively steady for the next 40-50k years before the next round of cooling is expected to hit.

        Weirdly to me (probably because I'm not a paleoclimatologist), the current interglacial seems to be extraordinarily steady in terms of temperature. This is probably something that really helped us develop large social struc

        • "Regardless, the issue isn't what the past was like (except as a method for predicting what nature had in store for us), the issue is not making things any more uncomfortable for us than we can avoid. I don't care if some dinosaurs had it worse, I care about maintaining the nice climate I was born into."

          You can't figure out how to maintain your nice climate unless you can isolate human-induced climate change from naturally occurring climate change. And to do that, you must understand the geologic record. Th

      • See, this is the problem. You have been led to believe that global warming is so absolute, so immediate, and so rapid, that you'll literally be able to observe its changes from farm land to crusted desert. That is just not so. Were you aware, for example, that what is now the Sahara Desert was once filled with lakes, rivers, and rich vegetation? The reason you aren't aware is because there is a cycle of dry/wet in that part of the world that has a period length of 15,000 years. You can drill core samples fr

        • Re: "3rd highest in 65 years of reporting"! (Score:4, Informative)

          by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @08:05AM (#64374414)

          The fact that it used to take 15,000 years, but now takes only a human lifespan is precisely the problem. These changes *are* coming fast, because theyâ(TM)re no longer part of the natural cycle. This is precisely the point of the hockey stick curve. Itâ(TM)s not the climate change that is the problem, itâ(TM)s the speed of climate change.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      The question is not what the climate might have been in the past but what the climate is now compared to what it would have been now had humans not introduced industrialization, factory farming, mechanical means of transportation, electricity and the other CO2 emitting things humans have been doing for a while now.

      • A question that cannot be answered without being able to compare it to the past, because you need to isolate human-induced changes from naturally occurring ones. So far, I have not seen any study which has been able to do that. Natural variation is so large, that the human component is too small to isolate with what we know so far.

    • Do you have a geology degree? Because I have an inkling that you don't.

  • and away we go (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @12:23AM (#64374008) Journal
    This will continue to climb UNTIL real measures are taken by ALL nations.
    WHen most nations continue to grow their emissions and just 1 of them makes up about 50% of the growth each year, well, not much chance for seeing this drop.
    The west needs to get smart and start taxing ALL consumed goods/services based on where the worst part/sub-service comes from. Then and only then, will we see all nations work to drop it.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Tax America more. That'll solve it.

      Nobody is forcing an American to be twice as polluting as everyone else. Once you cut in half and are similar to everyone else then maybe somebody will take you seriously. But all you're doing now is complaining about the people who are already much cleaner than you and always have been.

      • Itâ(TM)s not the Americans being the polluting people, itâ(TM)s the Chinese. The point is that America (and the rest of the west) canâ(TM)t directly affect emissions because itâ(TM)s china thatâ(TM)s making them. That means the only levers we have are taxing imports from China. Taxing everything based on how much CO2 was emitted making it makes a huge amount of sense, especially if those revenues are then channeled into green manufacturing, which would then be price competitive w

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Noo it's definately the Americans [ourworldindata.org]
          They've always been much worse [ourworldindata.org]

          Taxing everything based on how much CO2 was emitted making it makes a huge amount of sense, especially if those revenues are then channeled into green manufacturing, which would then be price competitive with the cheep Chinese imports. This would then boost US manufacturing, and power industries, acting as a huge economic boost.

          Quite possibly true. But WindBourne just wants to tax China and not tax America. He will jump through all sorts of hoops to pretend America isn't one of the worst places for CO2. Either in total (the stupid measure) or per capita (the correct measurement).

          • How is total the stupid amount? The globe doesn't care WHERE the CO2 is coming from. So if USA has a lower TOTAL, then we're literally doing less overall damage. That China use to breed like rabbits isn't our fault. India is right there as well.

            Fortunately, most countries that begin to increase their wealth also so a drop in births. China is having an issue with this and South Korea even more so. USA is as well, but we're still importing people to make up for the deficiency in births. The problem of course

        • Itâ(TM)s not the Americans being the polluting people, itâ(TM)s the Chinese.

          Person for person, it's the Americans.

          The correct answer, however, is that you need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from both China and America.

          Note that if you taxed carbon dioxide emissions equally, China would pay more, even though per person they emit less, since there are more of them.

          • Per capita, we are below 15 highest. In fact, we are below Canada and Australia.

            Per capitia is a worthless measure at this time. Why? Because it is LONG PAST TIME for ALL NATIONS TO DROP THEIR EMISSIONS. At the very least, we need to get nations to stop increasing their emissions. That is why putting a tax on locally consumed goods/services based on where the WORST part/sub-service comes from makes good sense. Only have the normalization be based on emission direction. If dropping for several years in a

    • What I'd like to see is the governments investing in things like high-voltage DC that ultimately make it more profitable to burn less CO2. Imagine if solar from the Sahara could reach the cloudy UK with only 30% energy loss, hydro dams could store more water when it's windy or sunny anywhere in their hemisphere and generate more when other renewables are not available, and energy users who are able to time-shift their demand (e.g. electric car charging at home) can do so in a free market that naturally hel

  • Acid test (Score:2, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 )
    I propose an acid-test for effective global heating mitigation policies: If a new policy doesn't negatively affect the share prices of the fossil fuels companies, then it isn't going to be effective.

    Any effective global heating mitigation policy involves substantially reducing demand for fossil fuels so the prices & profitability of those companies should immediately go down.

    • If a new policy doesn't negatively affect the share prices of the fossil fuels companies, then it isn't going to be effective.

      Except that's not how companies work. E.g. policy to push EVs, a real negative for oil companies right? Well, the share price didn't go down, quite the opposite it stayed the same as companies in question started expanding EV charging infrastructure. Oh but maybe we want to decarbonise X and Y, fossil fuel companies to the rescue "have you heard of the good word of our lord and saviour green hydrogen?"

      You won't move a share price for any company run by someone with a brain because adapting something is easy

  • see above.

  • We have had decades of agitation about CO2 emissions and global warming. If you look at a chart of these emissions, you see that it has not made the slightest difference to the trend, which is steadily up. It hasn't even raised the number of people who think global warming is a topic of great concern. Globally that number is insignificant.

    Covid made a bit of a dent, but its picking up again now, particularly Chinese emissions.

    https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org]

    Its really time to recognize that carrying on

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