Climate-Change News — Heat to Sea-Level Rise To Record CO2 Levels

April 14, 2021

Beyond the political idiocy of Republicans, today one who doesn’t understand satire, and for a couple of weeks another who’s been upgraded from just fucked to royally fucked to a subject matter really out-distancing all of our so-called problems right now, which is climate change, really a climate crisis.
A runaway fright train barreling down the tracks right into our worldwide, collective faces — no shit:

Just as Ms Goodall says, all our troubles right now are seemingly temporary as their importance rankings with the planets ‘only’ environment going to shit in a wire basket is way-down there. Athough Joe Biden has taken the bull of climate change by the horns and attempting to do some curbing of emissions  — as Janet Yellen said last week, “We lost four important years” thanks to the T-Rump — it will be an uphill fight to get a grip on the snowballing crisis.

A few points of the concern as our climate is tricky:

Dr. Jeff Masters yesterday at Yale Climate Connections and some March read-out conditions:

March 2021 was the eighth-warmest March since global record-keeping began in 1880, 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53°F) above the 20th-century average, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, NCEI, reported April 13.
NASA also rated March 2021 as the eighth warmest March on record.

While it was the eighth-warmest March since 1880, March 2021 was Earth’s coolest March since 2014, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service and NOAA.
The relative coolness was partially the result of a weakening La Niña event in the Eastern Pacific: Its cool waters helped depress global surface temperatures.

The year-to-date period January-March ranked as Earth’s ninth-warmest such period on record. According to NCEI’s annual temperature outlook, the year 2021 is more than 99-percent likely to rank among the 10 warmest years on record, and 95-percent likely to fall in the range of fourth-to ninth-warmest on record.
The NCEI outlook finds that 2021 has a less than 1-percent chance of becoming the warmest year on record, reflecting the modest cooling influence of the La Niña event in the Eastern Pacific.

Global ocean temperatures during March 2021 were the ninth-warmest on record, as were global land temperatures for the month.
Global satellite-measured temperatures in March 2021 for the lowest eight kilometers of the atmosphere were the 11th-warmest in the 43-year record, according to Remote Sensing Solutions.

The 12-month period ending March 2021 was the driest on record for most of the southwestern U.S., and the latest seasonal drought forecast from NOAA calls for drought to expand eastwards over much of the central U.S. by June.
Drought is likely to be a multi-billion dollar U.S. weather disaster in 2021.

Here in California we grasp the drought thingie.

Another climate-change exclusive — sea level rise:

And just such a story from Cape Cod, Massachusetts — via the Guardian this morning:

On 31 March, the handful of workers who operated the National Weather Service station in Chatham were evacuated due to fears the property could fall into the Atlantic Ocean.
A final weather balloon was released before they left, with a demolition crew set to raze the empty site this month.

Until recently, the weather station had a buffer of about 100ft of land to a bluff that dropped into the ocean, only for a series of fierce storms in 2020 to accelerate local erosion.
At times, 6ft of land was lost in a single day, forcing the National Weather Service to order a hasty retreat.

“We’d known for a long time there was erosion but the pace of it caught everyone by surprise,” said Andy Nash, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Boston office.
“We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn’t have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem.”

A parking lot next to the weather station has already been torn up due to the crumbling land, with the building now just 30ft from the edge of the bluff.
Nash said his greatest fear was that a researcher, while looking up at a weather balloon as they released it, would inadvertently topple over the edge to their death.

“We got to the point where we ran out of a lot of space and if you were concentrating on the balloon near the edge, oh, that would not be a good situation,” Nash said.
“The balloon is fairly big and full of helium but it’s not big enough to hold someone up. It would not save you.”

And finally, a situation I spied earlier this month, but failed to give notice — our CO2 concentration has become literally off the charts:

Despite the slight dip last year due to the COVID pandemic, we’re heading back up. According to CO2Earth, yesterday the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded 415.81 ppm, a slight dip from last Friday’s reading, but still way-shitty.
According to NOAA Research released last week:

The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, rising by 2.6 ppm during the year.
The global rate of increase was the fifth-highest in NOAA’s 63-year record, following 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.
The annual mean at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii was 414.4 ppm during 2020.

The economic recession was estimated to have reduced carbon emissions by about 7-percent during 2020. Without the economic slowdown, the 2020 increase would have been the highest on record, according to Pieter Tans, senior scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory.
Since 2000, the global CO2 average has grown by 43.5 ppm, an increase of 12-percent.

The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period around 3.6 million years ago, when concentrations of carbon dioxide ranged from about 380-to-450 parts per million.
During that time sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7-degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.

“Human activity is driving climate change,” said Colm Sweeney, assistant deputy director of the Global Monitoring Lab.
“If we want to mitigate the worst impacts, it’s going to take a deliberate focus on reducing fossil fuels emissions to near zero – and even then we’ll need to look for ways to further remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.”

And added shit:

Analysis of samples from 2020 also showed a significant jump in the atmospheric burden of methane, which is far less abundant but 28 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat over a 100-year time frame.
NOAA’s preliminary analysis showed the annual increase in atmospheric methane for 2020 was 14.7 parts per billion (ppb), which is the largest annual increase recorded since systematic measurements began in 1983.
The global average burden of methane for December 2020, the last month for which data has been analyzed, was 1892.3 ppb. That would represent an increase of about 119 ppb, or 6-percent, since 2000.

We in a wide-world of hurt — in the immortal words of the Pinball:

Bad news and some real-bad news…

(Illustration found here)

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