A friend of mine who happens to be a retired climate scientist pointed me towards a couple of interesting pages. First, from yesterday, is a post from Matt Rigby covering the crisis, now resolved, over CFCs:
“I work on an experiment that began when the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive was at the top of the charts. The project is called AGAGE, the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment, and I’m here in Boston, Massachusetts celebrating its 35-year anniversary. AGAGE began life in 1978 as the Atmospheric Lifetimes Experiment, ALE, and has been making high-frequency, high-precision measurements of atmospheric trace gases ever since.
At the time of its inception, the world had suddenly become aware of the potential dangers associated with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). What were previously thought to be harmless refrigerants and aerosol propellants were found to have a damaging influence on stratospheric ozone, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The discovery of this ozone-depletion process was made by Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, for which they, and Paul Crutzen, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995. However, Molina and Rowland were not sure how long CFCs would persist in the atmosphere, and so ALE, under the leadership of Prof. Ron Prinn (MIT) and collaborators around the world, was devised to test whether we’d be burdened with CFCs in our atmosphere for years, decades or centuries.
ALE monitored the concentration of CFCs, and other ozone depleting substances, at five sites chosen for their relatively “unpolluted” air (including the west coast of Ireland station which is now run by Prof. Simon O’Doherty here at the University of Bristol). The idea was that if we could measure the increasing concentration of these gases in the air, then, when combined with estimates of the global emission rate, we would be able to determine how rapidly natural processes in the atmosphere were removing them.
Thanks in part to these measurements, we now know that CFCs will only be removed from the atmosphere over tens to hundreds of years, meaning that the recovery of stratospheric ozone and the famous ozone “hole” will take several generations. However, over the years, ALE, and now AGAGE, have identified a more positive story relating to atmospheric CFCs: the effectiveness of international agreements to limit gas emissions.
Matt goes on to note the implementation of the Montreal Protocol and how it helped both guide and show how the steps taken to limit and eliminate CFCs were effective, and includes this nifty chart:
Concentrations of methyl chloroform, a substance banned under the Montreal Protocol, measured at four AGAGE stations.
And Matt continues to today:
Over time, the focus of AGAGE has shifted. As the most severe consequences of stratospheric ozone depletion look like they’ve been avoided, we’re now more acutely aware of the impact of “greenhouse” gases on the Earth’s climate. In response, AGAGE has developed new techniques that can measure over 40 compounds that are warming the surface of the planet. These measurements are showing some remarkable things, such as the rapid growth of HFCs, which are replacements for CFCs that have an unfortunate global-warming side effect, or the strange fluctuations in atmospheric methane concentrations, which looked like they’d plateaued in 1999, but are now growing rapidly again.
My friend pointed out that we’re not yet seeing a similar reaction in CO2 readings, as seen in the Mauna Loa station readings provided by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory:
This chart covers the last 5 years:
Over the last few years the PPM had been increasing at a rate of 2 parts per million (ppm) / year, but that seems to have increased to 3 ppm / year, as demonstrated with this growth chart from the same site:
Just for fun, let’s look at oil prices from MacroTrends.net:
Source: WTI Crude Oil – 10 Year Daily – Macrotrends.net
Finally, my friend notes the followup on the Paris Agreement is just beginning. I’ll just lift this from his mail:
| Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) | ||||||
| Volume 12 Number 666 | Monday, 16 May 2016 | ||||||
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Bonn Climate Change Conference |
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| 16-26 May 2016 | Bonn, Germany | ||||||
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The Mauna Loa monitoring station is just one of the important ways to monitor how the efficacy of the reaction to the climate change crisis. The work of the ALE group (which my friend stressed began as an industry group which recognized there was a problem growing from their own products, and came together to discover what it was and what it entailed – makes me think of conscious capitalism) provides a good model and a promise of success in resolving difficult problems – but it will only work when people take science seriously. That’s a problem in today’s world, where we believe in anything from homeopathy to the primacy of ideology – all in contradiction to science. And while there’s a certain schadenfreude in watching reality rear up and smack them in the head, the sad fact of the matter is that a lot of innocent folks will get smacked as well.
