EARTH DAY

Fifty years ago, when I attended events for the first Earth Day at my college campus, I really thought there was an excellent chance that people would see the danger of global warming and climate change, and that action would be taken.

Youth and optimism have been replaced by age, experience and realism.

And I don’t think the disaster will be solved. At least not by any disaster-free programs. On days when the news is worse, I think of humans as the failed evolutionary experiment in biological intelligence that can foresee the results of its actions and modify its behavior accordingly to maximize survival.

As a lifelong student of history, who has also been involved in environmental actions going back to when I created an economically-viable office paper recycling program for California State goernment (which didn’t really solve the real problem, but let them tell people they were “working on it”), I don’t see any examples in history of that ever happening on any meaningful scale. The EVs that are going to “save us” are so expensive tht 80% of American families cannot afford to buy one. Within 20 years of our extinction, none of the Great Things we have built will be visible on the planet from orbit, other than the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian Pyramids. We’ll be gone like the dinosaurs, and perhaps evolution will get it right the next time.

With that as preface, here’s “all the news that’s fit to print” from last Saturday’s New York Times:

Carbon Dioxide Levels Have Passed a New Milestone

By Aatish Bhatia

Carbon dioxide acts like Earth’s thermostat: The more of it in the air, the more the planet warms.

In 2023, global levels of the greenhouse gas rose to 419 parts per million, around 50 percent more than before the Industrial Revolution. That means there are roughly 50 percent more carbon dioxide molecules in the air than there were in 1750.

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, it traps heat and warms the planet.

Currently, carbon dioxide levels are rising at near-record rates.

According to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory earlier this month, last year had the fourth-highest annual rise in global carbon dioxide levels.

How much carbon dioxide levels rise in a given year depends on two factors: the amount of fossil fuels burned globally, and the share of these emissions that are absorbed by the land and the ocean.

Consider the first factor: While it’s true that clean energy production is rising globally, so is the demand for energy.

Fossil fuels have made up the difference. This is why global fossil fuel emissions are still at record-high values (with a brief dip during the pandemic). And they stayed high in 2023, according to a projection by the Global Carbon Budget.

Not all of these emissions end up in the air. The ocean and land absorb roughly half of the carbon dioxide that humans emit, while the rest stays in the air, said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research.

As the Earth warms further, climate scientists expect the land and the ocean to absorb a smaller share of carbon dioxide emissions, causing a larger share to end up in the air, said Doug McNeall, who studies these effects at Britain’s Met Office.

Xin Lan, the lead scientist responsible for NOAA’s global carbon dioxide measurements, referred to the natural absorption as a “carbon discount.”

“We pay attention to it because we don't know at which point that this discount is gone,” she said.

In addition to carbon dioxide, the levels of other potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide are also on the rise, which further contribute to warming.

2023 was unusually hot, both on land and in the ocean. (The oceans absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat caused by global warming.) It was the hottest year in over 170 years of record keeping, even exceeding scientists’ predictions.

One contributing factor to 2023’s extreme heat was El Niño, a climate pattern that tends to raise global temperatures. During El Niño, warm ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean cause warmer and drier weather in the tropics. This can lead to droughts that slow the growth of trees and increase the risk of wildfires.

To limit warming to this threshold, experts say countries need to slam the brakes on global emissions and bring them down to near-zero in about a decade. And some are even considering more extreme technological solutions to help bridge the gap.

Even if global emissions were brought down to half of their current value, we would still continue to add carbon dioxide to the air, causing further warming.

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