The Washington Post and many other news outlets report that yesterday, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached 419 ppm (parts per million) in May. It was a measurement of the average monthly level for the month of May.
It is the highest level ever measured since we began measuring CO2 63 years ago. Ever.
Despite the shutdowns and slowdowns of the pandemic and declines in other greenhouse gases, we still reached a record for CO2. It is because we are burning fuel to produce energy, in power plants, industrial facilities, and for transportation.
Pieter Tans, a scientist with NOAA, is quoted in the Washington Post: “It’s significant in that it shows we are still fully on the wrong track.”
In other news, The Guardian reports about a new study where scientists ran multiple computer analyses. In almost one third of the analyses we reached tipping points even if we kept average global temperature change to 2.0 degrees C.
We are already seeing health effects from climate change in the Southeast – flooding, hurricanes that are more destructive, more heat, longer ozone seasons, more mold and pollen, and more. The western half of the U.S. is under extreme drought conditions right now, much worse than it was a year ago, which was before the start of the worst fire season ever.
It’s clear we need to make major changes, fast. We need to switch to clean renewable energy, and stop burning fossil fuels and other subsitutes such as wood pellets. We need all our trees to be left intact, removing CO2 from the air. We need to stop putting CO2 in the air. Not net-zero, just stop.
We wasted the last decade not doing much, and now there is no longer time for bridge fuels, or thinking about net-zero. It is time for massive investments to rapidly shift to clean energy, to keep us all healthy, especially our children.
Read the article in the Washington Post here.
Read the article in The Guardian here.
06/08/2021
