finir

finir

There's no point anymore. I will delete this blog in a few days.

I would really like to be done with this and just stop thinking about it.

US COVID Deaths Surpassing Last Year's

The last couple of weeks for the current year are always subject to changes (increases).

I'm not going to start wearing a mask yet, but I am going to get vaccinated as soon as the new batch is available in mid-September. (Will be my 7th; I still haven't had COVID yet.) 

Data source: CDC (scroll down to "Click here to download", then click "Export", then "Download file".)

Did You Know This? I Didn’t

I didn't expect this, but world per capita emissions peaked in 2012, according to OurWorldInData:


Notably this doesn't include land use changes, or any other anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

As of 2022, annual per capita CO2 emissions had declined by 4.6%. Since 2020, the height of the pandemic (but a local minimum in emissions), it has increased by 4.3%. It would need to increase by another 4.7% to reach the 2012 maximum.

Interesting to see the effect of two world wars and a Great Depression. But what happened between 1970 and 2000?

Global Temperature vs Change in CO2

Here's a plot of NOAA's annual global temperature (anomaly) versus the annual change in atmospheric CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in uppermost Hawaii.

Temperature anomalies relative to 1901-2000. (But a change of anomaly wouldn't change the graph, only the numbers on the y-axis.)

Data:

NOAA monthly global temperature anomaly (in second box choose "All Months")

Mauna Loa monthly CO2

PS: Just for fun, mostly. Not a surprise.

PPS: As always here, click on the graph to get a cleaner picture. (Grrrrr)

Asparagus

"They left, saying they would return after five o'clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrace and the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza's favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighboring patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost and went to sleep when it was almost three o'clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus." 

-- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

(A wonderfully delightful book)

Dumb Climate Talk from a Dumb Guy

"9 Things Musk and Trump Said About Climate Change, Annotated: In a conversation on X, Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk spoke for a bit about climate change. Here’s what they got wrong and what they got right," New York Times, 13-Aug-2024. 

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/climate/elon-musk-trump-climate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.suwF.jAIfEt7o6YMU&smid=url-share

Then there was this gem from Trump:

“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property."

For the record, 1/8th of an inch is 3.2 mm, which global average sea level rises every 9 months now.

Climate Knowledge in the '60s

An interesting article that just came out:

"The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s: It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated," Kate Yoder, Grist, 5-Aug-2024.

https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-supreme-court/

H-T Volcano had a Slight Cooling Effect, and it's Now Over

The Hunga Tonga volcano, the underwater volcano that erupted in January 2022 and has been blamed for the recent warming spike, crop failures on Mars and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, had an overall cooling effect when it injected vast amounts of volcanic aerosols and water vapor into the atmosphere, according to a paper just published in JGR Atmospheres. Its effect has been over since the end of 2023.

Plain Language Summary

The Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai (Hunga) submarine volcanic eruption on 15 January 2022, produced aerosol and water vapor plumes in the stratosphere. These plumes have persisted mostly in the Southern Hemisphere throughout 2022 and into 2023. Enhanced tropospheric warming due to the added stratospheric water vapor is offset by the larger stratospheric aerosol attenuation of solar radiation. Hunga induced circulation changes that reduce stratospheric ozone and lower temperatures also play a role in the net forcing. The change in the radiative flux would result in a very slight 2022/3 cooling in Southern Hemisphere. The Hunga climate forcing has decreased to near zero by the end of 2023.

Here's a news article.

Lots of details of their conscientious work in the paper, which like all research published by the AGU is free, but here is graph of overall forcing from HT, compared to what would have happened without it.

Probably time to move on.