[dohboi]

Well...this is going in the wrong direction:

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/ ... /coal.html

Global coal consumption rose by 1% (in 2017)



Does anyone have any more recent numbers?

[Tanada]

Week beginning on May 12, 2019: 415.39 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 411.84 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 390.12 ppm

[Tanada]

May 23: 414.88 ppm
May 22: 414.48 ppm
May 21: Unavailable
May 20: 414.73 ppm
May 19: 414.75 ppm

[dohboi]

Is that the first week above 415? We keep hitting these grim milestones.

And year-on-year increase of 3.55...seems kinda high!

The ten-year yearly increase has been 2.53

[Plantagenet]

CO2 and CH4 emissions to the atmosphere continue to accelerate.

China and India are both still building hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Of course this is perfectly OK according to the Paris Climate Accords, because Obama made side deals with China and India guaranteeing both countries the right to emit as much carbon as they like so they can "catch up" with the west.

Surprisingly, the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere has also been increasing in recent years in spite of the UN treaty which successfully stopped the use of CFCs. CFCs are another powerful greenhouse gas and also destroy the planet's ozone layers. Just last week scientists announced they'd discovered the new source of the banned CFCs......they are coming from China.

china-factories-releasing-thousands-of-tonnes-of-illegal-cfc-gases-study-finds]

Cheers!

[Tanada]

As far as I can tell that is the record week so far. This is the time of year when we typically sit at the top of the arc for three or four weeks before we start the annual decline in late June.

As for yoy, this is an El Nino year, if you remember these years are always around 1 ppmv higher than the 'normal' years because so much less cold water is driven to the ocean surface where it would absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Even so the decadal rate has been steadily rising for the last 30 years due to the massive increase in world coal and other fossil fuels consumption.

As for the world coal consumption rate, I have repeatedly warned here on the board that claims of a decline were overly optimistic. Not only is China still adding a new coal burning unit every 7 to 10 days, India is on a massive building program of their own and most of the rest of the world population in Asia, Africa and South America that were left behind technologically are working hard to catch up. After all, what point buying a smart phone if there is no electricity to keep it charged and no cell tower or computer servers for it to contact? Every large city that does not already have a fully electrified culture is busting its chops to build one. A lot of those Chinese engineers who were building power plants at a rate of one every 3.5 days a few years ago are now working in other countries because the Chinese no longer need as high of a construction rate. IOW the Chinese are still building 2 coal burning plants a week, but now they are building them all over the nominally called 'third world' instead of all of them being in China itself.

For some examples, Turkey has doubled its coal consumption in the last 20 years. Mexico has doubled its coal consumption in the last 20 years. Peru has Tripled its coal consumption in the last 20 years. China has increased its coal consumption 2.5 times in the last 20 years. India has doubled its coal consumption in the last 20 years. Indonesia has tripled its domestic use and quadrupled its exports of coal over the last 20 years.

None of these figures are in dispute, you can find them on the EIA, BP, or IEA websites. I did have to do a little math to divide the most recent figures by figures around 20 years ago, but if you passed 6th grade you can handle that level of effort.

What frequently seems to happen is people focus on Western Europe/northern North America and point out that coal consumption has decreased somewhat while totally ignoring the other 6/7ths of the world population. This European/European descended focus is both short sighted in the extreme, it is unjust as if people outside of the lilly white population do not count in terms of desires or climate impacts. You could get away with that in 1960 when only Japan outside of Europe and North America was broadly technologically advanced. But this is 2019, putting 1960 attitudes over half a century out of date with reality.

[dohboi]

T wrote: "...this is an El Nino year..."

Good point.

And yes, I too have been suspicious of claims that coal consumption was really peaking much less going down.

As renewables outcompete coal economically in more and more areas, I would expect this to start changing at some point, but we don't seem to have gotten there yet, on the global scale at least.

[dohboi]

By the measure and station here, it looks like CO2e has crossed into the above-500 ppm zone over the last year:

https://m.phys.org/news/2019-06-greenho ... lised.html

[Tanada]

May 2019: 414.66 ppm
May 2018: 411.24 ppm

[Tanada]

Week beginning on June 9, 2019: 413.98 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 411.22 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 390.17 ppm

[Tanada]

Looks like we have peaked out for the annual CO2 levels and are on the summer slide now.

[Tanada]

June 18: 414.14 ppm
June 17: 413.62 ppm
June 16: 414.15 ppm
June 15: 412.96 ppm
June 14: 414.33 ppm

[Tanada]

Oh and if anyone cares precisely, Peak CO2 day 2019 was May 15 with a reading of 415.64. All five days with readings above 415 took place that same week between May 12 and May 17, 2019.

[dohboi]

Thanks, as always, T.

[dohboi]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... nt-834627/

When you look at this curve, two things are obvious. First, it is a smooth upward curve, with no breaks or dips or plateaus.

Despite the decline in the cost of solar power, despite all the climate marches in the streets, despite the wildfires and melting glaciers and increasing summer heat, it is very obvious that, by the only metric that really matters, we have done less than zero to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

[dohboi]

Apocalypse For Real has a posting about rate of CO2 increases on his blog. Well worth a look.

http://www.megiddo666.apocalypse4real-g ... acking.com


"The change from 210 to 280 ppm (emerging from the last ice age to beginning of the Industrial Revolution) took 15,900 years.
The change from 280 ppm to 350 ppm (reached in 1987, when the international community and energy industry unequivocally knew that emissions were going to cause a problem for human society) took only 202 years.

The last 60 ppm increase (350 to 410 ppm) has only taken 32 years.

This has never happened in 800,000 years. In fact, in the ice core data there is no record of a 10 ppm increase in 39 years - until human emissions impacts in the 1900's.

Global CO2 concentrations have never increased by 10 ppm in 47 months. There is no comparison in 800,000 years of ice core data. Nothing in paleo-climate proxies. Only in models with polynomial, or exponential, curves.

We are in uncharted "terror incognita" (pun intended)."

[Tanada]

June 2019: 413.92 ppm
June 2018: 410.79 ppm

[Tanada]

Week beginning on June 30, 2019: 413.38 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 409.57 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 388.63 ppm

[Tanada]

July 09: 411.58 ppm
July 08: 410.76 ppm
July 07: 413.15 ppm
July 06: 413.25 ppm
July 05: 413.10 ppm

[dohboi]

Thanks, as always, for these, the most important numbers of our era.