Few can doubt that climate change is a reality after recent record high temperatures, leading to wildfires, around the world. Temperatures soared to the high 40s in southern Europe and in the USA the temperature climbed to 53.3C in Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada.
The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 56.7C in July 1913 at Furnace Creek in Death Valley. Temperatures at or above 54C have only been recorded on Earth a handful of times, mostly in Death Valley. Barbara and I experienced the extreme heat there in 1994. We had stayed overnight at June Lake, just over 200 miles away and had to scrape ice from the car windscreen in the morning before the drive to Furnace Creek, where the temperature was well over 40C!
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| Death Valley 1994 |
There is little doubt that humans have contributed to these extreme events, but there are also other contributing factors, such as El Niño and in June climate scientists announced that an El Niño weather pattern had taken hold, which would strengthen through to the end of this year and the first months of 2024, warning there is a good chance that it could be a particularly strong El Niño this year.
It would appear that they were right but in July a team of climate scientists, the World Weather Attribution Group, said that the intense heatwave in Southern Europe, North America and China would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.
It is all all very sobering and maybe we should have heeded the warning in a New Zealand newspaper, headed Coal Consumption Affects Climate:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
What is particularly prescient about this warning is that it was published in the Rodney and Otamatea Times on August 14th 1912! It was based on the work of Svante Arrhenius, who 16 years earlier had measured the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (see also Is CO2 the most maligned gas in history?).
Maybe we should have heeded warnings from the past?
"The era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived"
UN Secretary General, António Guterres
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Your point is well taken Barry: millions of years of naturally sequestered carbon, released into the atmosphere within a couple of hundred years. Unsustainable.
ReplyDeleteThanks Baz for realistic commentary on climate change.
ReplyDeleteOur Ian Plimer has been banging his head against the left wing greens opinion on CC for years and perhaps because he is home grown and goes against the “accepted view” gets very little political support... but some commercial radio jocks do get him on the air to level the field.
Your reference to the NZ guy’s calc about coal burning adding 7 Billion tons of CO2 per year in 1910 thereabouts, over 10-120 years ago made me think about today - we are consuming 8.3 billion tonnes in 2022 – so it makes one think.
Back then the CO2 ppm level was about 300ppm and now is at 411 so the increase in coal burning (19%) doesn’t seem to match the measured increase (36%) in CO2 ppm...
Using the calculation of there being 3140 billon tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere at 411ppm (below) then the CO2 weight in 1910 at 300ppm was 2292 Bt. So in 110 years the weight of CO2 has increased annually at ~7.5 Bt.. that’s from all sources including cattle, volcanoes, forest fires, vehicles etc
But the NZ guy in 1912 reckons humans were adding 7Bt of CO2 alone by coal burning, when consumption was only 2Bt of coal per annum. Today coal consumption is more than 4 times that!!! - 2022 = 8.3Bt so does that means it’s adding 18Bt of CO2 pa.. really? .
So it doesn’t compute that coal is adding as much as is alluded to.. or am I missing something? Are the oceans, soils and trees absorbing that much?..
Thanks Baz .. most thought provoking
Millard Lowe, NSW, Australia
Timely,Barry; greed,GDP growth with norespect to NATURE and people across the globe led to this;I may add that all the blame should not go to "coal"--time to pause and work as a Team.
ReplyDeleteT.C.Rao
Earlier I was hesitant to add but will do now. Academic and S&T community also were busy with progress of their own fields of specialisatins but failed to warn planners and politicians on these matters.
ReplyDeleteNo offence to anyone pl.
T.C.Rao