2023 Mauna Loa CO2 curve: An unfolding planetary disaster, including April’s defensive power outages, in progress.[/caption]

A reader’s e-mail ledes: “Dear Obnoxious Smarty Pants, in August you talked about CO2 and warming. You said we’ve got to cut our carbon burning. I told my wife you were a lame-brained know-it-all and this climate garbage is nonsense. But after we lost a bunch of food and couldn’t pump water in April’s big power outage, she told me to ask if this is the wave of the future. You might be a knuckle-head, but to make her happy, I’m asking. Riled Up in Rollinsville.”

Dear Riled, thanks for checking in. I’ll take a disgruntled reader over no readers, any day.

Climate change is the physics of CO2. I’ve brought in atmospheric scientist Dr. Cartagena Othman-Ortega (CO2) to talk about your question.

F: Was April’s multi-day power switch-off because of climate change? Is it the start of things to come?

CO2: There’s no maybe about it, Frank. That power outage was a consequence of atmospheric CO2 hitting 425 parts per million, fifty percent above its pre-industrial level. It was a climate crisis warning shot for this area.

F: How so?

CO2: Carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning has heated and dried our conditions to the point where downed power lines now routinely start wildfires that destroy entire towns and kill people. Power companies can’t let that go on. In the Colorado winds of April 6-9, 2024, something finally had to give. Climate change came home to roost as we sheltered in place.

CO2: Just in the last few years, downed-powerline wildfires have destroyed Marshall, Colorado; Lahaina in Maui; Texas communities in the Smokehouse Creek fire; and Ono, Greenville, Paradise, Concow, and Magalia, in multiple California fires. This is what our world has become.

F: What’s new? Back in 1910 the legendary Big Blowup burned down towns and killed people across Idaho, Montana, and Washington. It’s still the single biggest wildfire in US history.

CO2: Catastrophic wildfire events used to be decades apart. Now they’re yearly.

F: Why?

CO2: Because we’ve injected more CO2 into the sky than any time in the past five million years. Not five thousand years, five million years. When our little Australopithecine ancestors were experimenting with upright walking in east Africa.

F: You’re sure it’s us?

CO2: The atomic fingerprint of the new CO2, called isotopes, doesn’t lie. It’s ancient carbon, yanked out of the ground and burned.

F: What’s the chain of events?

CO2: Carbon dioxide pollution energizes our atmosphere, making heat waves and windstorms more severe and more frequent. Power lines blow down more often. Then they’re more prone to explode into catastrophic wildfires, like a dirigible at Lakehurst.

F: The response?

CO2: So now, power companies have to pull the plug on their grids in high winds. Inaction invites lethal wildfires that burn down whole towns. They can’t fly the dirigible in high winds.

F: What about the consequences: lost food; lost business; lost money; knocked-out medical devices; inoperative pumps in water wells; no electric heat; dead phones; and all the rest, when power is out for days at a time?

CO2: It’s horrendous. It’s the consequence of having used our air as a waste dump. It’s the REAL price of carbon fuel, not the pump price of $3.17 per gallon. It’s hitting us all, after the energy companies foisted their fuels in full knowledge, even decades ago, of what was going to happen.

CO2: That defensive power outage was climate change. Not a century in the future. Not a decade in the future. But now. Right now. Here. April 6-9.

F: You say energy companies saw this coming. Elaboration, please?

CO2: Scientists working for one of the world’s largest private oil companies became concerned about CO2 in the 1950s and 1960s, because it was known since the late 1800s that CO2 controls planetary temperature. By 1977 that company outfitted a supertanker with a sophisticated CO2 measurement system for air and seawater. Then they spent a million dollars a year, for three years, collecting worldwide data with it.

F: They spent big bucks and got good CO2 data way back then? On an oil tanker, of all things?

CO2: Yes. Their data showed that oceans didn’t suck up very much; that almost all burned carbon went into the atmosphere and stayed there.

F: Did they model and predict based on the results?

CO2: They sure did. Their scientists published in respected scientific journals, for a while. They developed heating predictions that were as good as, and sometimes better than, what the government and universities were doing. They closely predicted what’s now happening.

CO2: Some of them wrote an urgent (now notorious) memo for their top management, saying that heating effects of CO2 would become obvious by 2000. Spot-on, as it turned out.

F: What happened?

CO2: Between about 1977 to around 1990, some oil companies pushed to understand, and reduce, CO2. But by the mid-1990s they switched their approach.

F: To what?

CO2: They dropped their science and scientists. They started campaigning, directly and through secondary outlets, to sow public and political doubt about uncertainties in climate predictions and modeling.

F: Like tobacco companies, claiming nobody “knows” if smoking “really” causes cancer?

CO2: The same. Substitute “fossil fuel” for “tobacco,” and “climate change” for “cancer,” and you have that same campaign, starting about 1995. It staved off political action on climate change. Actions have consequences. That misinformation campaign was a contributing factor in this April’s power cut-out.

F: Your sourcing?

CO2: It’s recounted in the peer-reviewed journal Science. At your local library, request: Science, January 13, 2023, vol. 379, issue 6628, “Assessing … Global Warming Predictions,” by Supran, Rahmstorf, and Oreskes.

F: Final question: Is this part of some cycle?

CO2: Absolutely not. It’s a one-way road, as long as we’re hiking carbon upward. The natural Milankovitch Cycle, governed by orbital variations, swings between ice ages and warmer inter-glacials. We’re currently in a Milankovitch inter-glacial with slightly down-trending temperatures. Unfortunately, our 425 ppm of CO2 is swamping that cooling.

F: What do we do?

CO2: Don’t give up! Giving up is what the fossil fuel companies, and the politicians they own, want. Support non-carbon energy. Go electric! The sooner we flatten that CO2 curve, the less total effect we and our children and their children are going to feel.

F: Closing thought?

CO2: Act, and vote, now. Because as we are experiencing firsthand with self-protective power outages like April 6-9, we’re really in it now, deep. The less and later we act, the worse this will become. Delay can be deadly.

Frank Sanders, a spectrum scientist at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Boulder, takes science-related inquiries at backyardastronomy1@gmail.com.