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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the too-much-fizzy-cola dept.

The World Meteorological Organization issued a press release about its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin:

Globally averaged concentrations of CO2 reached 403.3 parts per million in 2016, up from 400.00 ppm in 2015 because of a combination of human activities and a strong El Niño event. [...]

[...] Since 1990, there has been a 40% increase in total radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate - by all long-lived greenhouse gases, and a 2.5% increase from 2015 to 2016 alone, according to figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration quoted in the bulletin.

[...] Atmospheric methane reached a new high of about 1 853 parts per billion (ppb) in 2016 and is now 257% of the pre-industrial level.

BBC News reported:

"The 3 ppm CO2 growth rate in 2015 and 2016 is extreme - double the growth rate in the 1990-2000 decade," Prof Euan Nisbet from Royal Holloway University of London told BBC News.

[...] Another concern in the report is the continuing, mysterious rise of methane levels in the atmosphere, which were also larger than the average over the past ten years.

The Aliso Canyon gas leak happened in 2016.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:30PM (#591719)

    One might guess that that could be the intended meaning. Did you post the original critique?

    I don't have expertise in this topic, but I see that a December 2016 paper [wiley.com] in Geophysical Research Letters, which is peer-reviewed, also uses equations which have a square root dependence on the concentration when calculating the radiative forcing for N2O and CH4 (see Table 1); for CO2 they use an equation with a logarithmic dependence on the concentration, just as the IPCC did. The original critique ridicules the IPCC without explicitly stating why its methodology is invalid.
     

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:06PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:06PM (#592158) Journal
    No. And the critique is based on the approximation being based on a particular radiative model of the atmosphere. If the model is biased for global warming effect, one would expect to see this in the approximations as well. So a superlogarithmic effect in the approximation may well be due to bias in the model rather than a real world phenomenon which appears to be the thrust of the critique.