March 2024 Was the Worst Month Ever for CO2 Increases Measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory. [View all]

As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep spreadsheets of the of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.

Facts matter.

When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.

Here's a recent post referring to weekly data:

2024's Unprecedented Terror At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory Continues.

This post refers to the monthly data.

Over the past week, there has been incredible instability in the daily readings, calling into question, to my mind, whether the issue is instrumental or a reflection of real instability owing to surges in the releases of CO₂.

I commented on that earlier this week:

Is the atmosphere momentarily too unstable to measure?

It's worrisome.

Now let's cut to the chase:

Monthly data is reported on the Mauna Loa data pages going back to March of 1958, and thus increases over the previous year are available going back to March of 1959, extending over 65 years and representing 780 months.

Of those 780 months, the increase of over March 2023 measured in March 2024 is the worst ever recorded for any month in any year, 4.38 ppm:

March 2024: 425.38 ppm
March 2023: 420.99 ppm
Last updated: Apr 05, 2024

Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2

The previous worst March to March was in 2016 compared to 2015, when the increase was 3.31 ppm.

There have been in the last 64 years only four months in which such average readings exceeded 4.00 ppm. One is this month. Another is last month (4.25 ppm higher than February 2023). The others were April of 2016, (4.16 ppm higher than April of 2015) and June of 2016 (4.01 higher than June of 2015).

A news item in the scientific journal Science suggests that the rate of heating per unit of carbon dioxide may be increasing because of changes owing to a change in the albedo of the Earth owing to improvements in the management of reflective air pollutants:

Clearer skies may be accelerating global warming

Subtitle:

I strongly object to the use of the words "declining pollution" in the subtitle. Carbon dioxide is air pollution, and the sooner we state as much, the better. Chemical air pollution kills between six and seven million people per year; heat related air pollution derived from CO₂ and methane are killing by a different mechanism, and have been doing so for a long time.

Climate change was already killing people around the time I started writing here:

Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003 Robine et al., Comptes Rendus Biologie, 331 (2008) 2, 171-178.



Things are unambiguously much worse in 2024 than they were in 2003.

How many people died from radiation releases at Fukushima again?

The carbon dioxide released to power the production of on line and print selective attention, including but hardly limited to tiresome, insipid and mindless bullshit about Fukushima should disgust any ethical human being in my view.

It is very difficult to contain my anger.

There is some statistical noise in these readings, but the overall trends are clear enough, inescapable, dire, terrifying, even as they are largely ignored or swept from attention by cheap diversions:

In spite of these ever worsening and ever more astounding numbers - people lie to each other and to themselves but numbers don't lie - you will still find people mindlessly cheering for fantasies about bourgeois toys that do nothing to address climate change, be they electric cars, solar cells and/or wind turbines, all of which are exercises in promoting the use of fossil fuels, the destruction of wilderness, and the demand for mining. We also have people here and elsewhere selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," the production of hydrogen, which overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, involving exergy destruction and thus driving climate change faster along with all of the other public fantasies.

The big lie people tell themselves and each other that these pixilated reactionary schemes, electric cars, solar cells, wind turbines, hydrogen blah, blah, blah is "doing something" about climate change. This is nonsense. That it is nonsense is clearly shown, again, by the numbers. The reactionary scheme of carrying on about so called "renewable energy" that led us here was never about climate change or any other environmental issue and the claim that it is is an afterthought. It was always about attacking the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear energy.

The antinukes won and humanity, and in general, the rest of the biosphere lost.

We're clueless.

Have a swell weekend.