The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa Stretches Further and Deeper into 2025.

[NNadir]

Last edited Sun Feb 23, 2025, 12:21 PM - Edit history (1)

As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep spreadsheets of the of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.

Facts matter.

When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.

A recent post (not my last on this topic) reflecting updating this on going disaster (last week) is here:

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa Stretches Further into 2025.

To differentiate this post from the last post, I added the words "...and deeper..." into the title.

We've just had another very, very, very bad week of data, that of the week beginning February 16, 2025.

Week beginning on February 16, 2025: 427.67 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 424.55 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.43 ppm
Last updated: February 23, 2025

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Most of the time I produce posts in this series, I refer to increases of the 1 year week to week comparators, generally when one of the readings among the 2,560 week to week comparators recorded at the observatory appears in the top fifty. For this week, week7 of 2025, the increase over week 7 of 2024, is 3.18 ppm higher, which given the acceleration of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere does not place it in the top 50 such comparators, which generally motivates one of these posts.

What motivates this post is the ten year comparator, which is 27.24 ppm higher than it was in week 7 of 2015.

The disturbing thing about this week's reading is where it stands among comparators with the reading of ten years previous. Of all such ten year comparators among the 1659 comparators week to week comparators over a ten year period, this is 2nd highest ever recorded. The highest, 27.65 ppm occurred in 2024, in the week beginning February 4, 2024, week 5 of 2024, which also gave the highest single year comparator, that with week 5 of 2023, where it was 5.75 ppm higher.

All of the top 50 highest comparators in week to week comparisons with that of ten years earlier have taken place since 2020. Of the top 50 such data points, the 8 of the ten highest have occurred in 2024. The two that didn’t is this week’s, week 7 of 2025, and week 3 of 23. Overall, 27 of the top 50 occurred in 2024. All seven of 2025’s readings thus far are in the top 50 of comparators with ten years earlier.

In fact, every single one of the ten year comparators has appeared in the top 50 since the week beginning September 1, 2024..

Let me put it another way, every week for the last 25 weeks, has been in the top 50 weeks in comparison with the readings ten years earlier in late 2014 and early 2015.

Actually, there is a considerable, but not dramatic, amount of statistical noise in these readings, and to "smooth" things, I keep a 52 week running average of the ten year comparators. This is also the highest ever observed; on average over the last 52 weeks, readings are 25.96 ppm higher than they were 10 years earlier. In all the years I've worked with this data, this running average is the highest ever observed.

In week 7 of 2015, this running average was 21.15 ppm/10 years.

Things are getting worse faster.

People lie, to each other and to themselves, but numbers don't lie.

If one looks, one can see that the rate of accumulation recorded at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory is a sine wave superimposed on a roughly quadratic axis:



Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2

Referring to the crude quadratic axis in the graphic above, one can make a rough model of the behavior of this system, using simple high school level calculus, by treating the rate of change in the rate of change - the change in the 52 week average comparators - as a second derivative with respect to time (in years), integrating twice, and using, as boundary conditions, the 1 year comparator, and the current reading. In my spreadsheet I do this automatically. If one solves the resulting equation using the quadratic formula to see when we will hit 500 ppm, one will see this should take place in 2044. (I will be dead then, and not live to see what little warnings I offered here.) The crude equation predicts that in 2050 the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste will be somewhere between around 520 ppm.

The same media that loved to promote a seriously intellectually crippled serial rapist, con man and felon as a viable Presidential candidate, and is kissing his ass after succeeding at putting this ventriloquist's dummy in the White House after installing the real power, his Maggotcy King Eloon the First, on the throne, likes to talk about a so called "energy transition" that is supposed to save our asses.

This highly advertised propaganda is connected with the unsupportable belief that the vast sums of money spent so called "renewable energy," which I personally regard as reactionary as the six thugs of the apocalypse in the rogue US Supreme Court, is about addressing climate change.

It isn't.

The reactionary impulse to make our energy supplies dependent on the weather, this precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather by lying to ourselves about our continuous and rising use of dangerous fossil fuels, was always an ignorant attack on nuclear energy.

The ignorant attack on nuclear energy, every bit as ignorant as all the other ignorance flying around, the only industrial scale infinitely expandable carbon free primary energy source available, was made at the peril of all humanity, perhaps all living things.

Thus all of humanity, perhaps all living things, are indeed in peril, extreme peril. The opportunity to address this peril is withering rapidly.

It is not clear how much longer, in the attack of science in this country by the looney drugged up king controlling the ventriloquist's dummy, the CO₂ data will be available at Mauna Loa. As long as it is, I'll report though, as American power, scientific and otherwise, crumbles into dust.

Have as nice a Sunday as one can have under the circumstances.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Crap. Climate reports will need to start using Olberman's "worse, worser, and worsest".

Is it just me, or does that average look more like an exponential than a linear (or quadratic) plot ?

Anything controlled by population is likely to be exponential, and we're kidding ourselves if we don't realize it. Of course, we've always kidded ourselves about population growth. If we don't tackle that problem, it won't matter that much what ultimately does us in; something will do us in if population growth is never checked.

[NNadir]

2. I assumed a quadratic by looking at the graphic for the axis on which the sinusoidal function is imposed.

I merely integrated twice as described below:

Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:

As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.

If one looks at the data collected at the Mauna Loa displayed graphically, one can see that the curve is not exactly linear, but has a quadratic aspect somewhat hidden by the small coefficient (0.04) of the squared term:

I originally did this in this post:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

The thread was taken up by real, real Dunning-Kruger type of antinuke, one so ignorant as to be sure to reinforce his or her or their ignorance, including a precious announcement that nuclear energy is dangerous because of the generation of ¹³⁹Ba which the poster claimed decayed into a "toxic element." The half-life of ¹³⁹Ba is about 83 minutes, and it decays into stable lanthanum, which is certainly not an element known to be especially toxic, but is often included in electronic devices.

One hears these sorts of things and one doesn't really want to believe it.

It is, of course, somewhat amusing to hear just how uneducated antinukes can be, but that one has to be a classic, almost as dumb as a poster over at the benighted DailyKos website who went by a name I won't share, who once listed a bunch of half-lives for radionuclides, maybe 10 or 15, with not one - not even one - being even remotely correct. One wonders where these people get this stuff, and how they manage proudly to advertise, indeed parade, their ignorance.

(I'm sort of pleased that I was banned at DailyKos for telling the truth. Some of the people there, that one included, were unbearably, depressingly poorly educated, but nonetheless took themselves all too seriously. Hence the burning planet. I surely don't miss that place.)

I suppose one could integrate to an exponential by assuming that the rate was proportional to time, but I don't think over the range of data it would give an especially different result. I wanted to limit the analysis to high school calculus.