The China Syndrome

Some would like to imply that the problem of CO₂ emissions is mainly due to China and India. They are, after all, the 1st- and 3rd-largest total emitters as of 2009, and their CO₂ emissions are growing fast. In fact I often hear the complaint that nothing anybody does will make any difference unless China and India go along with the plan. I think this is a just an excuse to argue against doing anything, and I think it’s a lousy excuse.

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Airborne Fraction

Dave Andrews wonders:

Tamino,

For all your pretty graphs aren’t you missing something here?

The Mauna Loa, et al, figures show a roughly steady increase in atmospheric CO2 but there has been a massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels since 1990, especially, but not restricted to, India and China.

This huge increase is not being reflected by the Mauna Loa figures.

Hide the Incline

Many of you are familiar with the work of “Greenman3610” who creates outstanding videos to debunk denier talking points. Here’s the latest installment (a little under 18 minutes long) about the stolen emails:

http://climatecrocks.com/2011/04/28/unwinding-hide-the-decline/

Cherries Jubilee

There are a couple of recent posts on WUWT about sea level. It starts with this indulgence in conspiracy theorizing, then moves on to this look at some sea level data from NOAA.

Let me summarize for you, in graphical form, what this last post really reveals:

Jerk

In the last post I showed that not only is CO₂ increasing, its growth rate is also increasing. So, the growth rate of CO₂ is faster now than it was just a few decades ago. Significantly so.

CO2 shame

It’s a shame, really. We’ve been aware of the climate change effect of carbon dioxide for over 100 years. We’ve known for at least 30 years that human-caused increases in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases will have a powerful impact on climate within decades. We’ve seen it happen — already. We now know that its effect over the next century will be disastrous. But we haven’t moved an inch toward stopping what will bring disaster on our own heads.

It’s like knowing all about the tremendous harm from smoking cigarettes, but still inhaling three packs a day.

Northeast U.S. Snowfall

Here in Maine we had a lot of snowfall today. It wasn’t very cold — well within the normal range for this time of year as far as temperature is concerned — but the snowfall was very heavy, nearly a foot of snow on the 1st of April. No, this is not an “April fool’s” post.

There is an interesting post at Climate Central on snow in the northeast U.S. It touches briefly on the trends which might be present, and those we might expect in the future (over the next century). It also presents a nice graphical access to data for total winter season snowfall from 98 northeastern stations with complete or near-complete coverage from 1980 to 2010, with those few cases of missing data infilled by interpolating nearby stations. The data they use can be found here, and originate from the Northeast Regional Climate Center.