2015 comes in as the worst year ever observed at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory.
Data trumps theory, 100% of the time, always.
For decades, we have heard all kinds of stuff about how we would address climate change. We are not addressing it.
The preliminary data for 2015 is now in at Mauna Loa and it's telling. We have many people here who can only understand things when presented as a graphic, and here it is:
The preliminary data shows the increase in 2015 to be the first to exceed 3.00 ppm in a single year: 3.17 ppm
Before 2015, the worst year ever observed was 1998, at 2.93 ppm, a year that had an unusual event inasmuch as much of the Southeast Asian forest burned when fires set to clear land for "renewable energy" palm oil plantations (for German biodiesel) went out of control.
As for so called "renewable energy" which has been hyped to a point nearing insanity for roughly half a century, nothing, absolutely nothing draws out its grotesque failure than this data. I repeat my long standing statement that it is not actually renewable, inasmuch as it requires, owing to its low energy to mass ratio, the massive mining and refining of metals and other materials, many of which are highly toxic.
The last, best hope for humanity was one that has traditionally be the subject of much malign fear and ignorance from some of us on the left, nuclear energy. (It remains the only source of primary energy to have avoided 60 billion tons of the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the planetary atmosphere, equivalent to about two years worth of said dumping.) It remains the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy, but it is only expanding at a trivial rate, with eight reactors having been shut in the worst CO2 year ever observed, and only 10 new reactors having come on line in that same year.
World Starts Up 10, Shuts Down 8 nuclear reactors in 2015
We deserve what we are getting. Fear and ignorance, so dire in human history has triumphed again. I would like to congratulate all of the anti-nukes here and elsewhere on their grand victory, even as I am prone to weep at what their "victory" means for the future of humanity and the world.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
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