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Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize
The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in Tasmania. Credit: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)
CAPE GRIM, Tasmania — On the best days, the wind howling across this rugged promontory has not touched land for thousands of miles, and the arriving air seems as if it should be the cleanest in the world.
But on a cliff above the sea, inside a low-slung government building, a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.
For more than two years, the monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has continued into 2017.
Scientists are concerned about the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the 1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from the data that countries compile on their own emissions.
That raises a conundrum: If the amount of the gas that people are putting out has stopped rising, how can the amount that stays in the air be going up faster than ever? Does it mean the natural sponges that have been absorbing carbon dioxide are now changing?
Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize by Justin Gillis, New York Times, June 26, 2017
The basics of scientists’ understanding of climate change can be communicated in five key points: It’s real, it’s caused by humans, it’s bad, the experts agree, and there’s still hope for fixing it, according to John Cook, a research assistant professor at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.
“When you look at all the climate denial arguments, they’re basically the flip of all that: It’s not real, it’s not us, it’s not bad, the experts disagree or the experts are unreliable, and there’s no hope, we can’t fix it,” Cook told HuffPost. “You expect them to be moving along that spectrum.”
Don’t Be Fooled By The Gentler Tone Of Charles Koch’s Climate-Change Denial by Alexander C Kaufman, HuffPost, June 26, 2017
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Climate Feedback asked its network of scientists to review 95-Degree Days: How Extreme Heat Could Spread Across the World by Brad Pulmer & Nadja Popovich, New York Times, June 22, 2017
Four scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘high’.
A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Accurate.
Click here to acess the entire review.
Quote derived with author's permission from:
"We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions."
High resolution JPEG (1024 pixels wide)
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 2 July, 2017
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