Bad Climate News From Hawaii - CO2 At Highest Level In 4 Million Years

The Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory, where precise 
measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts
are taken. To nobody's surprise and everyone's dismay,
concentrations hit a record high this year.
Photo from the Associated Press.

 Near the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, they've been measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for decade.  

It goes up every year, and it set a new record this year.  This was expected, but bad news. Carbon dioxide is the famous greenhouse gas, and is largely responsible for the climate crisis the world is experiencing. 

Carbon dioxide, as measure atop that Hawaiian mountain, peaks every year in May.  This year's peak brought the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 421 parts per million in the atmosphere.

That doesn't sound like much and it isn't. But scientists have long known that a little bit of carbon dioxide goes a long way toward wrecking what was once a fairly stable global climate.

CO2 concentrations are now about 50 percent higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. For about 6,000 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution, carbon concentrations held steady at around 280 parts per million, notes the Honolulu Star Advertiser. 

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising every since we started in earnest digging up fossil fuels like coal and oil and burning it, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.   

Scientists think the last time carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere were this high was about four million years ago. Kinda before my time. 

The Star Advertiser had some gloomy assessments from scientists who reacted to the latest carbon dioxide measurement from Mauna Loa. they asked hey sought out for comment.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2," said Ralph Keeling, a renowned geochemistry professor who runs the Scripps program at Mauna Loa. '"Fossil fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speeds toward a global catastrophe."

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory, told the Star Advertiser the higher levels of CO2 recently measured aren't exactly breaking news, but still frustrating. "We have known about this for half a century and have failed to do anything meaningful about it... 'What's it going to take for us to wake up?"

Readers of this here blog thingy have seen so many posts about strange, dangerous and deadly weather in the past few years. With the latest science news from Hawaii, you will unfortunately see many more posts about extreme, climate driven, deadly weather. 

Today's weather news is "good" in that I'm not aware of an event today killing scores of people. But that has become an exception. We do have brutal heat waves to report today in parts of Europe, India, Pakistan and the United States Southwest.

It also looks like the U.S. heat wave will expand and intensify across much of the South in the coming days, which of course is bad.

Here in Vermont, for now, we are blissfully safe. We'll have a windy day today and probably a fair number of showers tonight, Thursday and over the weekend.  Nothing scary. But it's only a matter of time before another climate driven storm or heat wave will screw things up here in the Green Mountain State. Just like in the rest of the world. 

Cheerful post today, huh?