Monday, February 28, 2011

CO2 has risen some more from burning fossil fuels. Here's the latest report from NOOA:

Recent Mauna Loa CO2

January 2011:     391.19 ppmCO2 Trend for Mauna Loa 
 PDF Version
The graph shows recent monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii.
The last four complete years of the Mauna Loa CO2 record plus the current year are shown. Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO2 itself, after water vapor has been removed. The mole fraction is expressed as parts per million (ppm). Example: 0.000400 is expressed as 400 ppm.
In the above figure, the dashed red line with diamond symbols represents the monthly mean values, centered on the middle of each month. The black line with the square symbols represents the same, after correction for the average seasonal cycle. The latter is determined as a moving average of SEVEN adjacent seasonal cycles centered on the month to be corrected, except for the first and last THREE and one-half years of the record, where the seasonal cycle has been averaged over the first and last SEVEN years, respectively.
The last year of data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. 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.

Full Mauna Loa CO2 record

Mauna Loa CO2
 PDF Version
Monthly mean atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii
The carbon dioxide data (red curve), measured as the mole fraction in dry air, on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at a facility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [Keeling, 1976]. NOAA started its own CO2measurements in May of 1974, and they have run in parallel with those made by Scripps since then [Thoning, 1989]. The black curve represents the seasonally corrected data.
Data are reported as a dry mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of molecules of dry air multiplied by one million (ppm).

Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii

The table shows annual mean carbon dioxide growth rates for Mauna Loa.
The annual mean rate of growth of CO2 in a given year is the difference in concentration between the end of December and the start of January of that year. If used as an average for the globe, it would represent the sum of all CO2 added to, and removed from, the atmosphere during the year by human activities and by natural processes. There is a small amount of month-to-month variability in the CO2 concentration that may be caused by anomalies of the winds or weather systems arriving at Mauna Loa. This variability would not be representative of the underlying trend for the northern hemisphere which Mauna Loa is intended to represent. Therefore, we finalize our estimate for the annual mean growth rate of the previous year in March, by using the average of the most recent November-February months, corrected for the average seasonal cycle, as the trend value for January 1. Our estimate for the annual mean growth rate (based on the Mauna Loa data) is obtained by subtracting the same four-month average centered on the previous January 1. Preliminary values for the previous year are calculated in January and in February.
The estimated uncertainty in the Mauna Loa annual mean growth rate is 0.11 ppm/yr. This estimate is based on the standard deviation of the differences between monthly mean values measured independently by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and by NOAA/ESRL.

Data

The complete Mauna Loa CO2 records described on this page are available.
Additional CO2 data from Mauna Loa and other worldwide sampling sites can be found using the ESRL/GMD Data Navigator of public data sets.
These values are subject to change depending on quality control checks of the measured data, but any revisions are expected to be small. The estimated annual growth rates for Mauna Loa are close, but not identical, to the global growth rates. The standard deviation of the differences is 0.26 ppm/yr.
How to reference content from this page 
Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL (www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/)
Contact 
  • Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL, ph. 303 497 6678, Pieter.Tans@noaa.gov
Further Reading 

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Since America has experienced severe snowstorms this winter, the climate skeptics are out in droves poking fun at how “ Al Gore’s liberals” use every weather event to prove global warming.  I’m not sure how climate change, or global warming, got politicized because its ramifications will impact conservatives and liberals; Republicans and Democrats alike.
It’s easy to tell when a climate denier is really on an ideologically hate rant. They almost always bring up Al Gore’s name or use the word politics a lot in their diatribe. That’s the give-a-way.
Climatologists have known for decades that climate change is happening. Al Gore didn’t invent or make up climate change information. He just compiled it into an effective documentary from many scientific sources.
As the science progresses and gets more sophisticated more is discovered. Weather patterns are regional and the snow storms are just that, weather. The operable word for climate related storms is: extreme. Many parts of America had very extreme weather events. A recent snowstorm was 2,000 miles across. You can see a satellite photo of it at NASA’s website. Ask Australia about extreme weather.  They had the most extreme flooding ever seen in that region. If I had the space here, I could go add a very long list of extreme storms.
The bottom line is, CO2 concentrations have increased by 110 parts per million (PPM) in the last 150 years from burning fossil fuels. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more moisture rises and the more comes down in extreme storms.  When Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth came out CO2 was 385 PPM, it is now 390 PPM and rising by 3 PPM per year. That’s a fact!
Rather than listening to ideological hate rants and following hearsay by people that have no clue what they are talking about, find out the real facts by following reliable scientific websites, get the science from the scientists not misinformed ideologues:
NASA http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
National Snow and Ice Data Center  http://nsidc.org/
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html
Richard Whiteford
Savebiosphere3@verizon.net