To WERGH or not to WERGH: CO2 Rising 10 Times Faster Than Any Time in Recorded History
"Research reveals the current rate of CO2 increase is unprecedented, being 10 times faster than any period in the last 50,000 years, highlighting significant implications for global climate dynamics."
Well that headline on SciTechDaily.com on May 15 2024 sure caught my attention even though I squinted through half-closed eyelids at 4am. Here’s some more:
Researchers conducting a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice have discovered that the current rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is 10 times faster than at any point in the last 50,000 years.
The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide an important new understanding of abrupt climate change periods in Earth’s past and offer new insight into the potential impacts of climate change today.
“Studying the past teaches us how today is different. The rate of CO2 change today really is unprecedented,” said Kathleen Wendt, an assistant professor in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the study’s lead author.
“Our research identified the fastest rates of past natural CO2 rise ever observed, and the rate occurring today, largely driven by human emissions, is 10 times higher.”
OK, so I’m happy with that; I love ice core work and tend to trust it as a data source. But here’s the thing… we know the planet creates more CO2 as it warms, and we know that the planet has been recovering from a recent mini ice age, and we know fossil fuel use has been rocketing since the industrial revolution… so how do we go about separating the contribution of natural background sources from human sources on a warming planet? This is not an easy thing to do and, when we cogitate sufficiently, we realise all depends on assumptions of atmospheric residency (which is in itself a dodgy concept). I’ve covered this roast chestnut before in this article series and this article, and this article. In a nutshell human emissions only start to make an impact on atmospheric CO2 if very long residencies are assumed of the order of +150 years. Plenty of research reveals this is pure fantasy on behalf of the IPCC and their modelling enclave, with other estimates coming out at 5 - 10 years and less. There’s a very informative and rather technical talk by the late Professor Murry Salby that lifts the lid on this that you may find here, the punchline being that CO2 residency must be of the order of 1 year or so despite claims to the contrary.
The upshot is that the bold statement “largely driven by human emissions” is based on erroneous speculation and not fact. I say this in no uncertain terms because us humans are currently consuming around 10Gt of fossil fuels per year, which translates into 4.7ppm atmospheric CO2, this being just over 1% of the total atmospheric concentration that stands at 426.57ppm at the time of writing. With the real world residency down at the year mark this is all we can ever expect to contribute.
But that’s not what grabs my interest. What grabs my interest is if today’s CO2 levels are rocketing like never before then we should expect that to be reflected in very significant one-way changes in surface temperature. However, we don’t see anything that dramatic, especially when land surface records are adjusted for the urban heat island effect that plagues measurement. In fact, we can even observe cooling of land masses and oceans over certain decades: the climate ain’t as simple as the media makes out.
But there’s yer problem, innit? It is legacy and social media who are telling us what is (allegedly) happening following highly selective editing and interviewing. And folk believe these people of all people! This peculiar behaviour should not come as a surprise for our civilisation has reached the stage where we have to be warned that there are peanuts in a packet of peanuts and that hot coffee is hot.
Cue Spuds!
After a rather splendid baked potato (two, in fact) with plenty of butter and smashed Roquefort for luncheon I hit upon the idea (not exactly a novel idea, mind) to produce a simple cross-correlation analysis of monthly atmospheric CO2 with the HadCRUT5 mean global temperature anomaly along with a revised ‘oomph’ chart1. What I mean by ‘oomph’ is how much CO2 has risen in each decade plotted against how much the mean global temperature has risen. In effect this is a proxy measure of climate sensitivity (an elasticity if you will), but we can also think of it as leverage. My preference is for ‘oomph’. Here’s the thing…
The SciTechDaily article is written in such a way as to get a bit of genuine science (Antarctic ice core) and try to spin it as though CO2 is out of control and that this is very bad news despite the plant kingdom lapping it up. The leap most people will make in their minds is that more CO2 will mean higher temperatures, and if CO2 is accelerating out of control due to fossil fuels then we’ll all bake to death real soon. We can’t blame folk for thinking like this for there is no end to the propaganda, deceit and corruption within climate ‘science’. What we can do is have a look at some slides to see if the real world suggests that this doomsday scenario might indeed be the case.
Let’s get that pot on the stove and open a tin of something; oh, and BTW, “WERGH” first appeared in print on 5 September 2022 in my article entitled ‘The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 2)’…
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