Another week of CO2 from Scripps

An update to my update from the original post. CO2 is rising 2 ppm/year and has been for about the last decade (see graph here). So the daily ups and downs and pretty miniscule. 2 ppm/year is 0.0055 ppm/day, or thought of yet another way – it’ll take about 180 days for CO2 to increase 1 ppm. While we await the inevitable, here’s an update with May 13 at least above 400 ppm, although the measurements are pretty variable for some reason.Variability in CO2 during the course of any one day can be for a number of reasons. One that scientists responsible for quality-control of the data have to account for is the simple fact that Mauna Loa is a gigantic shield volcano

Well, scientists are nothing if not rigorous and attentive, so here’s a nice post by a NOAA scientist talking about the volcanic CO2 pulses that occasionally disrupt the background CO2 measurements that Mauna Loa is best known for. I haven’t read the papers about the volcano relevant emissions, but the link at the bottom of the page gives the information needed to track down the publications via google scholar. That being said, it doesn’t look like the variability in the hourly values for May 13 CO2 was due to volcanic emissions.