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Trends in atmospheric co2 as measured at the peak of Mauna Loa, Hawaii: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ long term co2: htt

Trends in atmospheric co2 as measured at the peak of Mauna Loa, Hawaii: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ long term co2: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... And yet, we still have actual supposedly rational people being paid to say "global warming is a myth" or "we are just in another cycle of ice ages". It boggles the mind.

User23 5y ago
That chart switched from ice core to volcano data in 1958 which is why there is the sudden huge shift. Also, an active volcano is an interesting place to do CO2 observations given that volcanoes may well be the largest natural CO2 emitters on the planet. In any event I virtually never see any intelligent discussion of the subject, just cherry-picked data followed by disparaging anyone who might merely express doubt, let alone disagreement. That may well be effective for establishing partial consensus, but it’s not a particularly good way to increase knowledge and understanding. Edit: Responses like child’s being a case in point. Anyone that opens with “So…” and follows up with a straw man or even a complete non sequitur such as in this case is not contributing to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. Edit: As for CO2 sensors mine has been sitting in the mid 300s for the decade I’ve had it.
- walrus01 5y ago
  So your theory is that the hundreds of climatologists who've peer-reviewed co2 sensor data/papers based on information from mauna loa have all wilfully disregarded the existence of the volcano and its gases? That's interesting.
- unlikelymordant 5y ago
  You can buy a co2 sensor right now, go outside and measure very similar readings. Is that cherry picking too?
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  A lot of things to fact check your arguments. But CO2 measurements done in multiple places agree to a rising trend. Where did you get your information from?
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html Here you can view a globally distributed average. Or click “animation”. This is not “cherry picked” Ironically your anecdote at the end is a great example of irreverent cherry picking.
- hcknwscommenter 5y ago
  You should get your CO2 sensor checked, or move it to a place that is sampling outside air. If you have only seen cherry-picked data and have not seen intelligent discussion (and such discussion is something you really want to have), then I suggest you read the IPCC reports and participate in discussions regarding the IPCC reports. Your comment about the CO2 observation station on the active volcano is difficult to evaluate. I have never come across any convincing evidence that this matters. Have you?
egman_ekki 5y ago
The orange part in the long term chart confused me, it looks like as if that's not real. But it looks scary. Do we know what caused co2 dropping from 300ppm to 200ppm previously? There seems to be a pattern where it goes up and then back down...
- walrus01 5y ago
  I am no expert on it but apparently some of the natural pre-industrial-human trend does match with the timings of ice ages/glacial maximums and glacial minimums, on hundred thousand year time scales.
- kaybe 5y ago
  CO2 goes down due to chemical weathering - basically it binds to the rock and is then washed into the sea, where it is subducted into the mantle due to plate tectonics. It comes back up from volcanoes - the deep carbon cycle. The amount of weathering depends on the access the atmosphere has to the rock. If there is a thick ice layer, the rate goes down. Water plays a role as well, and the fastest weathering happens in the tropics and not the deserts (where you have mechanical weathering which does not bind CO2). Accordingly, the configuration of continents can play a role as well, which is interesting if you go back far enough. On the other hand, the volcano emissions appear somewhat constant over time. In total though, there are still many open questions. Why does CO2 appear to go up so fast after an ice age? Does CO2 or temperature go up first? In the records, the temperature increase appears rather sudden, on the timescale of decades. How does this happen? (Note though that that has no huge importance for our current problem since the situation is different. But the reaction speed of the system is relevant, for example.) Note: If we wait long enough (~tens of thousands of years) the CO2 level should go down again from weathering. There are proposals for carbon capture that uses this mechanism (by grounding the rocks and distributing them openly so the atmosphere can reach a lot of the rock surface, thus increasing the weathering rate massively). Note2: You need silicate rock, which is not distributed evenly.
gedy 5y ago
From this chart, I'm still amazed that the massive behavioral changes in 2020 due to pandemic had seemingly no impact on CO2. Makes me think personal transportation in the US is not worth bothering about if we care about global CO2.
- graeme 5y ago
  That’s not how it works. Think of co2 level like a bathtub. Two factors influence the level of water: * Natural cycle. This goes up and down year on year: that’s the rise and fall you see in the chart. In real life it has to do with northern hemisphere summer and leaf growth. * Human activity. We’re pouring water into the bathtub and the water level rises So during the pandemic we just poured water less quickly. You wouldn’t expect a drop from that. You’d just expect a slower rise. To actually fix climate change we have to: 1. Get human emissions to zero 2. Start taking co2 from the atmosphere, actually lowering the water in the tub It’s a big task and we haven’t even really started. Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking. But we are laying the groundwork with renewable capacity and with rapidly advancing carbon capture and storage. SomI still hold out hope we can do it. But to do that we need to understand the basic shape of the problem.
  - gedy 5y ago
    > Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking. I get what you mean, and you likely mean global, but US emissions have actually been decreasing for about 15 years: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
    - graeme 5y ago
      Yes, I mean global. I’m not American.
refurb 5y ago
I’m not an expert of anything, but I’m pretty sure you can’t pick one monitoring station on one island in the Pacific and extrapolate that to the entire planet. Especially on an island of active volcanos that spew CO2. And not surprisingly there is a disclaimer “ The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface.”
- walrus01 5y ago
  The trend in global co2 almost exactly matches every other high precision co2 monitoring station run by other observatories/climate scientists in dozens of locations around the globe.
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  Click the “global” or “animation” tab then.

User23 5y ago

That chart switched from ice core to volcano data in 1958 which is why there is the sudden huge shift. Also, an active volcano is an interesting place to do CO2 observations given that volcanoes may well be the largest natural CO2 emitters on the planet. In any event I virtually never see any intelligent discussion of the subject, just cherry-picked data followed by disparaging anyone who might merely express doubt, let alone disagreement. That may well be effective for establishing partial consensus, but it’s not a particularly good way to increase knowledge and understanding. Edit: Responses like child’s being a case in point. Anyone that opens with “So…” and follows up with a straw man or even a complete non sequitur such as in this case is not contributing to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. Edit: As for CO2 sensors mine has been sitting in the mid 300s for the decade I’ve had it.

walrus01 5y ago
So your theory is that the hundreds of climatologists who've peer-reviewed co2 sensor data/papers based on information from mauna loa have all wilfully disregarded the existence of the volcano and its gases? That's interesting.
unlikelymordant 5y ago
You can buy a co2 sensor right now, go outside and measure very similar readings. Is that cherry picking too?
Gravityloss 5y ago
A lot of things to fact check your arguments. But CO2 measurements done in multiple places agree to a rising trend. Where did you get your information from?
jtsiskin 5y ago
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html Here you can view a globally distributed average. Or click “animation”. This is not “cherry picked” Ironically your anecdote at the end is a great example of irreverent cherry picking.
hcknwscommenter 5y ago
You should get your CO2 sensor checked, or move it to a place that is sampling outside air. If you have only seen cherry-picked data and have not seen intelligent discussion (and such discussion is something you really want to have), then I suggest you read the IPCC reports and participate in discussions regarding the IPCC reports. Your comment about the CO2 observation station on the active volcano is difficult to evaluate. I have never come across any convincing evidence that this matters. Have you?

egman_ekki 5y ago

The orange part in the long term chart confused me, it looks like as if that's not real. But it looks scary. Do we know what caused co2 dropping from 300ppm to 200ppm previously? There seems to be a pattern where it goes up and then back down...

walrus01 5y ago
I am no expert on it but apparently some of the natural pre-industrial-human trend does match with the timings of ice ages/glacial maximums and glacial minimums, on hundred thousand year time scales.
kaybe 5y ago
CO2 goes down due to chemical weathering - basically it binds to the rock and is then washed into the sea, where it is subducted into the mantle due to plate tectonics. It comes back up from volcanoes - the deep carbon cycle. The amount of weathering depends on the access the atmosphere has to the rock. If there is a thick ice layer, the rate goes down. Water plays a role as well, and the fastest weathering happens in the tropics and not the deserts (where you have mechanical weathering which does not bind CO2). Accordingly, the configuration of continents can play a role as well, which is interesting if you go back far enough. On the other hand, the volcano emissions appear somewhat constant over time. In total though, there are still many open questions. Why does CO2 appear to go up so fast after an ice age? Does CO2 or temperature go up first? In the records, the temperature increase appears rather sudden, on the timescale of decades. How does this happen? (Note though that that has no huge importance for our current problem since the situation is different. But the reaction speed of the system is relevant, for example.) Note: If we wait long enough (~tens of thousands of years) the CO2 level should go down again from weathering. There are proposals for carbon capture that uses this mechanism (by grounding the rocks and distributing them openly so the atmosphere can reach a lot of the rock surface, thus increasing the weathering rate massively). Note2: You need silicate rock, which is not distributed evenly.

gedy 5y ago

From this chart, I'm still amazed that the massive behavioral changes in 2020 due to pandemic had seemingly no impact on CO2. Makes me think personal transportation in the US is not worth bothering about if we care about global CO2.

graeme 5y ago
That’s not how it works. Think of co2 level like a bathtub. Two factors influence the level of water: * Natural cycle. This goes up and down year on year: that’s the rise and fall you see in the chart. In real life it has to do with northern hemisphere summer and leaf growth. * Human activity. We’re pouring water into the bathtub and the water level rises So during the pandemic we just poured water less quickly. You wouldn’t expect a drop from that. You’d just expect a slower rise. To actually fix climate change we have to: 1. Get human emissions to zero 2. Start taking co2 from the atmosphere, actually lowering the water in the tub It’s a big task and we haven’t even really started. Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking. But we are laying the groundwork with renewable capacity and with rapidly advancing carbon capture and storage. SomI still hold out hope we can do it. But to do that we need to understand the basic shape of the problem.
- gedy 5y ago
  > Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking. I get what you mean, and you likely mean global, but US emissions have actually been decreasing for about 15 years: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
  - graeme 5y ago
    Yes, I mean global. I’m not American.

refurb 5y ago

I’m not an expert of anything, but I’m pretty sure you can’t pick one monitoring station on one island in the Pacific and extrapolate that to the entire planet. Especially on an island of active volcanos that spew CO2. And not surprisingly there is a disclaimer “ The Mauna Loa data are being obtained at an altitude of 3400 m in the northern subtropics, and may not be the same as the globally averaged CO2 concentration at the surface.”

walrus01 5y ago
The trend in global co2 almost exactly matches every other high precision co2 monitoring station run by other observatories/climate scientists in dozens of locations around the globe.
jtsiskin 5y ago
Click the “global” or “animation” tab then.