Another DOGE/Trump Casualty: Crucial Carbon Dioxide Monitoring At Hawaii Site

This is the record dating back 67 years of atmospheric
carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, as
measured on Mauna Loa, Hawaii.  Trump and his
Musk/DOGE crowd apparently want to end these decades-
long observations. The excuse is saving money, but
likely just as much climate denial.

 Another likely casualty of Trump and the DOGE morons: A historic, closely watched, important constant measurement of global atmosphere carbon dioxide could be about to go by the wayside. 

Elon Musk and his DOGE minions want to shut down the more than six decade long science experiment  conducted on a Hawaii volcano.  

Per USA Today:

"Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is considering terminating the lease of a tiny office that supports a huge climate science experiment - one that's been ongoing for 67 years." 

Only eight people work at the office, Suite 102 at the Kilauea Financial Plaza in Hilo.  Once a week or so, one of the employees takes a quick helicopter ride up to a spot 11,135 feet above sea level on a high slope of the Mauna Loa volcano.

Doesn't sound like a big deal, but this is.  The scientists  do several observations of the atmosphere, and one of these regular observations is one of the most precise and long running, and most watched climate experiments in the world. 

The scientists have been tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 60 years. This long-running experiment provided the first significant, concrete evidence that the earth' CO2 levels were steadily rising, as USA Today reported.

The Mauna Loa site is perfect for these measurements, as NOAA tells us: "The observatory protrudes through the strong marine temperature inversion layer present in the region, which separate the more polluted lower portions of the atmosphere from the much cleaner free troposphere. 

"The undisturbed air, remote location, and minimal influence of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring constituents in the atmosphere that can cause climate change."

The DOGE people say closing the Hilo facility would save $164,000 or so. That's not much given the size of the overall federal budget.  My conspiratorial mind wants to think it's because climate change i central to the Mauna Loa site, and we all know how Trump hates it when somebody dares to say climate change is an actual thing. 

I'm not the only one thinking this way. In it's journalistic way, the Washington Post beat around the bush a little but you'll get the point in this excerpt from their article:

"Data collected from the observatory have shown global carbon dioxide levels - the most significant driver behind record planetary warming - are rising faster than ever recorded. Trump has been dismissive of that data and the consensus around climate change and his allies who wrote the policy playbook Project 2025 proposed dismantling NOAA, calling it a source of climate alarmism." 

Climate scientist Michael Mann, posted his reaction to all this on Bluesky was, as usual, more blunt.   "See no climate change, hear no climate change, and speak no climate change."

As usual, the Trump/DOGE crowd don't seem to be coordinating things or understanding what is going on. 

If the Hilo office closes, the Mauna Loa observatory would still be there, but with the office gone and the staff fired, if Musk gets his way, there will be nobody to do the actual work up there. 

There's another testing site on Mauna Kea, another volcano nearby, but again, that site needs NOAA staff to maintain the equipment. 

Not only is the climate data from Mauna Loa valuable, and a resource we might be about to lose, but the move to shut this all down gets rid of history, too.

Back in 1958, scientist Charles David Keeling began the measurements in 1958.  His measurements made two important discoveries. He was the first person to record Earth's breathing  - a regular rhythm of peaks and valleys in carbon dioxide concentrations.  

This proved that seasonally, plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when they're growing, and release it back when the growing season is over and the plants died.

Even more importantly, he was the first to prove that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were rising due to fossil fuel emissions. This discovery really laid the foundation to the detailed climate change science we have today. 

Before the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at around 280 parts per million. When Keeling first started measuring in 1958, it was up to 313 parts per million. Now, we're up to 427 parts per million and still going up. 

That amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sounds like a trifle to the untrained eye. But the last time carbon dioxide levels were this high was about 3 million years ago. At that time, sea levels were as much as 30 feet higher than they are now, and camel-like animals roamed the forested high Arctic, which is nowadays covered in ice.  

That's part of the future we face at least someday due to our sky-high emissions of fossil fuels over the past 150 years or so. 

Arctic Now Becoming Emitter Of Carbon Dioxide, That Dreaded Greenhouse Gas

In this photo from U.S. Bureau of Land Management,
permafrost, which has been increasingly thawing in
the Arctic, erodes into the Beaufort Sea.

Once upon a time, the Arctic used to be the place where carbon dioxide went to die.  

At least it seemed that way. It would get stored in the permafrost, seemingly locked in that icy prison never to bother us in the atmosphere again. never to bother us in the atmosphere again. 

Back in the day, that didn't matter much anyway.  There wasn't so much carbon dioxide in the air, so no real climate change. At least that's the way it was a century or more ago.

Now, just when we don't need more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Arctic is starting to belch it out, according to new information from NOAA. 

 The world has warmed up enough through climate change to alter the ecosystems of the Arctic, and that is prompting that stored carbon in the permafrost to come out of hiding to join the world's hot and getting hotter party. 

The news comes the 2024 Arctic Report Card, researched and written by 97 scientists from 11 countries.

NOAA says

"After storing carbon dioxide in frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is being transformed by frequent wildfires into an overall source of carbon to the atmosphere, which is already absorbing record levels of heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution."

Wildfires in the areas of North America with permafrost have increased in the past couple decades. The report says that since 2003, emissions from polar wildfires averaged 207 million tons of carbon each year. That's more than the annual carbon emissions from nations like Argentina and Austria. 

Arctic wildfires are only a relatively small piece of the problem.  The permafrost is melting more and more, releasing carbon into the air instead of storing it. That's why, for the first time, the Arctic is making the climate change problem worse, not better.

I found a good explanation of this at NPR:

"Twila Moon, lead editor of the Arctic Report Card and  scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, likened permafrost to chicken in the freezer: As long as it stays frozen, microbes stay away.

'Once you have that chicken out of your freezer, it's thawing and all those microbes are getting to work, breaking down the chicken, making it rot,' she said. 'The permafrost is really doing the same thing.'"

There was the tiniest glimmer of good news from Greenland, but it was definitely nothing to get the Champagne and confetti out to party. 

The Greenland Ice sheet mass loss was the lowest since 2013, mostly because it snowed more than usual up there. Still, the ice shoot lost somewhere in the broad range of 22 and 77 billion tons of ice last year. 

That was enough to raise the global sea levels by 0.15 millimeters. Which is too small for anybody to notice. But if you add in all the other sources of sea level rise, and compound them year after year, it starts to make a big difference. 

This report demonstrates that the Arctic has changed much in just a few decades. There's no way it's going to stay as it is  now, either. It's going to get worse.

The Arctic is the fastest warming region of the world.  There's no signs, and no reasons for that warming to slow down as fossil fuel emissions keep cranking.  Since the Arctic is also adding those emissions, if anything, the pace at which the Arctic deteriorates will also increase.  

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?