Gab, gab, gab --- but do nothing

 Updating this chart by O=C=O  (updated for 2023 data)

Gab, gab, gab.  All talk but no action.  Solemn promises to do something, followed by doing nothing.  Greenwashing, which persuades an increasingly anxious public that something is being done, when in fact it isn't.  Fake carbon offset schemes.  Lies, obfuscations, distractions.  While climate dissent is criminalised.   Meanwhile, right wing parties, in the US and Australia, want to stop deployment of renewables altogether.

And to make ourselves feel better, we gab, gab, gab.  And when I say 'we', I mean almost all of us.  For example, at no extra cost to ourselves, we could give up meat, cutting our emissions by 25%.  But we do not.

CO2 now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels

From New Atlas

Climate scientists have reported the highest levels of carbon dioxide ever recorded in the atmosphere. The latest in a long line of record-breaking years saw the world hit a grim new milestone of 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, a concentration not seen in over 4 million years.

Measurements made by the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii revealed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked at 420.99 parts per million (ppm) in May. An independent team of scientists at the Scripps Institute was in close agreement, recording a monthly average of 420.78 ppm.

This is the highest CO2 concentration ever recorded in human history – and if that statement sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been consistently breaking that record over the last few years. In May 2021 the record was set at 419.13 ppm, up from 416.21 ppm in May 2020, and 415.26 ppm in May 2019. For reference, scientists consider 350 ppm a safe level, as reflected in the name of the climate-focused non-profit organization 350.org.

Having breached the 420 ppm milestone for the first time, atmospheric CO2 levels are now 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, which consistently hovered around 280 ppm for the almost 6,000 years of human civilization. In fact, Earth hasn’t seen CO2 levels this high for over 4 million years, during a period known as the Pliocene Climatic Optimum.

At that point, average temperatures were 3.9 °C (7 °F) higher than the pre-industrial baseline, and sea levels were between 5 and 25 m (16 and 82 ft) higher than today. And since it looks like our record-breaking won’t be slowing down any time soon, we might be headed that way again, with disastrous consequences.

“The science is irrefutable: humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad. “We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day. The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps to become a more Climate Ready Nation.”

Source: NOAA

A graph illustrating the mean monthly carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since the 1950s

NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego

Global heating lag

 Just as with the lag between the midday peak of insolation and the afternoon peak in temperatures, and the summer solstice peak in June/December (depending on hemisphere) and the temperature peak one or two months later, so it has been believed that even if  we cut emissions to zero, global temperatures will continue rising for several more decades because of lags built into the system.

Recent research suggests that this might not be the case, which is good news, if true.  Not, note, because there aren't lags, but because 'carbon sinks' (like the sea) will absorb some of the CO2 from the atmosphere.  And anyway, temperatures will continue to rise "for a couple of decades."   

From The Guardian:

For many years it was assumed that further global heating would be locked in for generations even if emissions were rapidly cut. Climate models run by scientists on future temperatures were based on a certain carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. If this remained at the current high level there would be runaway climate disaster, with temperatures continuing to rise even if emissions were reduced because of a lag time before greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.

But more recent understanding of the implications of getting to net zero emissions is giving hope that the warming could be more swiftly curtailed.

Should this be achieved globally, “surface temperatures stop warming and warming stabilizes within a couple decades,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “What this really means is that our actions have a direct and immediate impact on surface warming. It grants us agency, which is part of why it is so important to communicate this current best scientific understanding.”

Scientists have now factored in the dynamism of the Earth’s natural systems, whereby stopping emissions would actually see atmospheric CO2 content go down due to the huge carbon absorption capacity of oceans, wetlands and forests. Mann likens it to filling up a sink with water with the drain partially open – the water level will still rise due to the incoming water but if you reduce the water flow it will drop due to the drain remaining open.

“This falling atmospheric CO2 causes enough cooling to balance out the warming ‘in the pipeline’ due to slow ocean heat uptake, and global temperatures remain relatively flat after net-zero emissions are reached,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate expert at the Breakthrough Institute. “The main takeaway for me is that this is good news, because it means that how much warming happens this century and beyond is up to us.”

This would give civilization time to adapt to the changes or come up with technological fixes. “At the moment we are changing the temperature a hundred times faster than what happened in the last ice age,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and co-author of the paper, published in Nature Climate Change. “An extra degree in a few hundred years is far less damaging than a degree in a few decades. The timescale is important.”

[Read more here]

Source: The BBC

 From Peter Kalmus

50 years of international agreements  on climate and still the Keeling curve keeps on rising.

Think of the level of atmospheric CO2 as water in a bath.  There is a trickle flowing out (natural weathering of CO2 with rocks) but we keep on turning the taps on further to let in more water (burning fossil fuels).  For the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to drop, we need to turn the taps down so low that the amount flowing into the bath (atmosphere) is less than the trickle flowing out.   Or we need to accelerate the process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, i.e., achieve negative emissions. 

Global emissions have probably peaked, because even though they will rise in 2021 from 2020, the steady growth of renewable electricity and EV sales will reduce CO2 emissions, faster and faster each year.  And the rise in 2021 won't take annual emissions back above 2019 levels. [Update, March 2025: No they haven't peaked.] But that won't be enough to cut the CO2 in the atmosphere.   For that to happen, emissions will have to fall to close to zero.  And until the level of atmospheric CO2 levels off, global temperatures will continue to rise.

Steep rises in CO₂

From The Guardian:

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by the second highest annual rise in the past six decades, according to new data.

Atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas were 414.8 parts per million in May, which was 3.5ppm higher than the same time last year, according to readings from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, where carbon dioxide has been monitored continuously since 1958.

Scientists have warned for more than a decade that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises as high as 2C, beyond which the effects of global heating are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.

May is the most significant month for global carbon dioxide concentrations because it is the peak value for the year, before the growth of vegetation in the northern hemisphere starts to absorb the gas from the air. The seasonal peak and fall can be seen in the Keeling curve, named after Charles Keeling, who started the observations on Mauna Loa because of its isolation in the Pacific Ocean.

This is the seventh consecutive year in which steep increases in ppm have been recorded, well above the previous average, and the fifth year since the 400ppm threshold was breached in 2014. In 2016, the highest annual jump in the series so far was recorded, from 404.1 in 2015 to 407.66 in 2016.

As recently as the 1990s, the average annual growth rate was about 1.5ppm, but in the past decade that has accelerated to 2.2ppm, and is now even higher. This brings the threshold of 450ppm closer sooner than had been anticipated. Concentrations of the gas have increased every year, reflecting our burning of fossil fuels.

[Read more here]

It's kinda obvious what we should be doing, isn't it? 

Carbon budget nearly used up

From Open Mind:

The “carbon budget” is an estimate of how much CO2 we can still emit, but still have a good chance to keep global warming from going over the 1.5°C limit into “dangerous” territory. The budget has recently been revised (upward, thank goodness) to about 420 GtCO2 (420 billion tons of carbon dioxide).

Staying within the 1.5°C limit doesn’t make us “safe” — there are still consequences of climate change, dangerous and costly, and we’re already paying the price despite not having hit 1.5°C yet. But going above 1.5°C takes us into what is best described as: nobody wants to go there.

If all of the “budget” amount of 420 GtCO2 went into the atmosphere, it would raise CO2 concentration by 50 ppm (parts per million). But when we emit CO2, only about half of it remains in the air. The other half is absorbed, mainly by the oceans and by plant life. So, our 420 GtCO2 budget translates to an increase of about 25 ppm in atmospheric concentration.

The air right now has about 410 ppm CO2. Adding another 25 will bring that number up to 435 ppm. In my opinion, that’s the number we should be looking at. Instead of a 420 GtCO2 emissions budget, we should be talking about a 435 ppm CO2 concentration limit.

That’s the kind of limit we can actually keep track of, with precision and accuracy.

[Read more here]

This chart shows atmospheric CO2, as an annual average, measured at Mauna Loa (Hawaii) and is called the Keeling Curve.

The second chart shows the Keeling Curve with the scale adjusted to show the carbon budget limit as ppm.

The final chart shows the projected Keeling Curve if we continue with BaU (business as usual), i.e., don't cut CO2 emissions.  And we cross the 1.5 degree carbon budget line in 2029, i.e., in 10 years.

It's obvious that we are not going to keep our emissions low enough to prevent 1.5 degrees C of warming.  Let's look at what's happening. 

First, the good news.  Because wind and solar are now so much cheaper than coal, the build out of new coal plants has fallen sharply, and old ones are being shuttered and being replaced by gas/renewables.  Emissions from electricity generation make up roughly 25% of total emissions.  Let's say it takes 20 years for all coal powered generation to stop.  That means (back of the envelope calculation) that this will reduce emissions by 1.25% per annum, ceteris paribus. 

Transportation is  roughly 15% (globally; it's 30% in the USA.)  This will fall only slowly (if at all) in early years because EVs will make up only a small proportion of the global vehicle fleet even when they reach 100% of new sales.    The average life of a car in the USA is about 12 years; globally, it's closer to 20.  When EVs are cheaper than ICEVs, the chances are that vehicle replacement will speed up, because EVs are already cheaper to run than ICEVs.  So let's be generous and assume an average life of twelve years.  That will mean that once EVs make up 100% of sales, emissions will fall by 8% per year, or 1.2% per annum of total emissions.  Put together, that means, ceteris paribus, that emissions will start to fall by 2.5% per annum.  However EVs won't reach 100% of vehicle sales until 2025 or later. And that glosses over the fact that we haven't yet got electric planes or electric freighters. 

There's still industry (20%): fossil fuels used for smelting ores, making steel and cement and chemicals, and so on.   Could we cut emissions in industry by 3 or 5% a year?  Yes, with a mixture of regulation and a carbon price.   There are low carbon replacements for cement; we can reduce iron ore to get iron using hydrogen (made with renewable electricity of course); we can make synthetic natural gas and gradually replace  natural gas with methane generated by the Sabatier process.  So let's assume that we can cut industry's emissions by 3% per year.  That adds another 0.6% a year off total emissions, making in round numbers a potential cut in emissions of 3% per year.

Agriculture (cow farts and burps; land clearing and forest burning; diesel for tractors, etc)  make up  25% of global emissions.   We could stop land clearing and forest burning now, if we had a firm conversation with Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Borneo and a couple of others. And we could also plant new forests or replace destroyed forests.  This would actually soak up CO2 from the atmosphere, giving us negative emissions.

Now, 3% per year cut in emissions would mean a 65% cut over the next 20 years, and 70% over the next 40---assuming it began now, which it won't.  That would be quite respectable if we hadn't left things so late.  Remember, it's not enough for emissions to fall for the Keeling Curve to stop rising.  They have to fall to zero for the accumulated atmospheric CO2 to stop rising.   Global temperatures have risen about 1 degree C from the 1880s.  They are now rising by 0.2 degrees C per decade.  Even if CO2 emissions peak this year (thanks in part to a recession) they won't reach zero for 40 years. So global temperatures will go on rising for at least the next 40 years, and likely by at least 0.2 degrees C per decade.  That will take us up by another 0.8 degrees from here.  Unless we accelerate the de-carbonisation process. 

Can we do that? Of course we can, if we really wanted to.  We could accelerate the retirement of coal power stations, from 20 years, to, say, 15.  We could encourage the take-up of EVs and the retirement of old ICEVs with tax tweaks.  A carbon tax would help shift the market away from carbon-intensive processes to carbon-free ones, for example, from making iron and steel with coal to making it with hydrogen. If the funds raised via the carbon tax were distributed as a "carbon dividend" to the people, the opposition to such a tax would be reduced. 

If we stopped land clearing and burning and actually started planting forests instead, net agricultural emissions would plunge.  Would the public stand for a red meat tax?  No.  But there is vat-produced meat just starting to be produced.  As we become more and more worried abut heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels, the politics could shift very rapidly   

To get to zero emissions by 2050, we need to cut emissions by 14% per year, starting this year.  But even 10% per year would cut emissions by 97% by 2050, which is pretty close to zero.  A 7% per annum cut would reduce emissions by 90% by 2050.  Not perfect, but, hell, that's still pretty good.  It could be done.  But it'll take willpower, willpower to resist denialists and fossil fuel fightback and ignorance and stupidity.  I suspect we won't get real action until we get panic.  When people start dropping like flies from the heat in the US.  When Miami is flooded every day.  When the summer heat in China starts killing children.  When 'once in a hundred year' floods start happening every second year.  Then, we'll get global co-operation.  Then, something serious will be done.  And until then, progress will be slow. 

We won't limit increases to 1.5 degrees C.   We might just manage 2.