The World Meteorological Organization issued a report today on atmospheric CO2 concentrations last year:
The increase in CO2 from 2019 to 2020 was...higher than the average annual growth rate over the last decade. This is despite the approximately 5.6% drop in fossil fuel CO2 emissions in 2020 due to restrictions related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
Shazam! Even during a huge recession caused by a global pandemic, global CO2 concentrations were higher than the recent average. Behold our progress in reducing the level of CO2 over the past few decades:
Nothing. Absolutely nothing has caused us to rein in CO2 even slightly. Here's another way of looking at it:
This shows the growth of CO2 concentration, and it belies the idea that we've done nothing. In truth, we haven't done even that well: CO2 concentration increased 2.3% in 2020. Despite everything, we've steadily increased the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 during every decade since measurements began.
Why should we think that the coming decade will be any different? When will we finally admit that our current approach is hopeless and we need to try something different?
Answer to question in last sentence:
Never, of course.
The foolishness with the current budgetary infighting is indicative of how bad humans are dealing with this crisis. We'll need ten times the trillions in half the time of the current BBB to even begin to alter the course of this suicide run.
The measures which might or might not be included in the BBB bill basically amount to a token. It would probably be better to leave them out, since they would give the impression that something is being done - it really isn't.
There is no "try something different" that will address the situation. There is no feasible way for humans to continue consuming resources (not just energy) at the current rate. We are already well above the long-term resource regeneration rate, and that's with only a minority of the population enjoying a "comfortable" lifestyle.
We need a reduction of an order of magnitude compared to the current rate in the US, and the only way that's going to happen is with a correspondingly drastic reduction in population.
Eventually, but for the actual answer, one key question is what motivates the financial, corporate and political elite who are blocking action. Are they still in denial about the reality and impact of climate change, or do they believe that their power and wealth insulates them and everyone they care about from the effects? Both seem insane to me, but if its the first action might come soon enough that everyone won't die.
Their wealth and power insulates them. It’ll take over a century before all parts of the earth are unlivable. New (possibly temporarily) livable land will open up in Canada for example as the US becomes unlivable… and the rich and powerful will buy their way into those places for themselves and their descendants.
The thing about this mindset, to me, is that their quality of live will be worse in a climate change ravaged world even with their wealth to partially insulate them. What makes them think marginal increases in their wealth are worth the cost? I think of it similarly to being ultra-wealthy but living in a nation where poverty is rampant and you're in constant risk of kidnapping for yourself and your loved ones. Sure, if you're rich enough you can probably hire enough security to make it very unlikely, but from an overall quality of life standpoint, doesn't paying more taxes for a social safetynet and better opportunity for the rest of the population just clearly make more sense?
The current trends are baked in for the next century. The *only* hopes are some combination of (a) global carbon capture and (b) geoengineering. Absent some transformational advances on those fronts, global resource wars will accomplish a drastic reduction in human population.
Yes, building technology will ease and eventually decline CO2. But the damage is already done.
Reject the "Green New Deal nonsense. It clearly doesn't sell anymore than Medicare for all line. Americans don't want it in aggregate. Results need things that make a difference and work.
I am very hostile to climate engineering precisely because of the "next century" part. Governments seem to think only up to the year 2100. Even IPCC forecasts are all about that year, not because scientists can't look farther but because they know politicians can't.
So what will happen if, with aerosols or whatever, we can bring temperatures down? The ball will entirely be dropped on fossil fuels and deforestation. It's naive to think we'll wisely use the time we gained. We'll do the opposite, relieved that Armageddon is for a bit later. Humanity and nature will become entirely dependent on aerosols being pumped into the air every single year. What when war or politics or the end of civilization puts an end to it? We don't have the right to make life on Earth dependent on our political and economic system which in no case will last for thousands of years.
"Humanity and nature will become entirely dependent on aerosols being pumped into the air every single year."
Humanity is entirely dependent on CO2 being pumped into the air every single year, destroying both nature and humanity. If we can buy a few decades, there's at least a chance of avoiding suicide. Without either carbon capture or geoengineering, suicide is assured.
"It's naive to think we'll wisely use the time we gained"
I think you're right, but I also think there's no realistic alternative for the same reasons. And who knows, maybe people will actually get smarter/better in the next few decades and the time gained will be used wisely.
And it gets harder to stop rising CO2 levels and warming the longer we wait. The oceans are losing their capacity to draw down CO2 amongst other issues.
It needs to be a all hands on deck moment--yet we still have 30% of the people trying to scuttle the boat.
You can capture carbon. Nobody wants to put money into it.
It's not a real thing. Power plants would have to burn 30% more fuel to capture the CO2--then something has to be done with that CO2. Ok, something other than just extracting more hydrocarbons to burn.
It might have been useful 30 years ago. Now it's just magical thinking.
And now for something completely different: a steadily rising carbon tax with household dividends.
Why hasn't it been done yet?
Because it would work.
Go to cclusa.org to help make it happen. We're out of time.
Where did the additional CO2 come from, if fossil fuel consumption was down?
from the report:
In 2020, atmospheric CO2 reached 149% of the pre-industrial
level, primarily because of emissions from the combustion of
fossil fuels and cement production. According to the International
Energy Agency, fossil fuel CO2 emissions reached 31.5 GtCO2
(5)
in 2020, down from 33.4 GtCO2 in 2019 [14]. According to the
2020 analysis of the Global Carbon Project, deforestation and
other land-use change contributed 5.7 GtCO2 yr-1 (average
for 2010–2019). O
Thanks for this
It's an unusual system that has to work in concert with other things. Our living Biosphere (living things) along with our Hydrosphere absorb CO2. So even when we DECREASE our emissions of Carbon Dioxide it is totally reasonable to think that deforestation is DECREASING the ability to absorb CO2 - resulting in an increase of atmospheric carbon.
It's not JUST burning fossil fuels - not JUST releasing methane - it's doing this while we harvest more and more of our biosphere materials for building materials and the like........
a gigaton here, a gigaton, pretty soon we're talking about real climate crisis.
Who’s this we of whom you speak?
Matters of sufficiency aside: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/
Adapt.
"...When will we finally admit that our current approach is hopeless and we need to try something different?"
When we acquire the emotional maturity to think through tradeoffs. (Hold not thy breath.)
Sorry but Kevin's post today and many of the comments seem to be completely devoid of logic and reading ability.
In Kevin's post, he cites a story that co2 emissions from fossil fuel DECREAED 5.6% but co2 in the air still increased and at a greater rate than avg of last ten years . And then he says right below that global co2 emissions were still up? And then quotes a chart to presumably show our progress in reducing co2 emissions but that chart shows co2 concentration in the air .
Well co2 emissions is NOT the same thing as co2 air concentration. Kevin is totally confusing this. So , in response to Ken asking where the extra co2 came from, nothing in what Kevin shows indicates there is anything " missing " at all. Presumably the question should be why lower fossil fuel emissions did not help at all in reducing co2 in the air . Not even did that not reduce it , it did not even reduce the rate of increase.
Seems that most here are so mind blind to any possible skepticism of the global warming theories that you just do not allow yourselves to see something staring you in the face .
Obviously one perspective is that, if things got even worse when the world ( involuntarily) finally did reduce co2 emissions like scientists have been arguing for , why would that not indicate that reducing co2 emissions does not work?
Now, in reality, my guess is that the relationship between co2 air concentration and fossil fuel emissions is just way more complex than expecting co2 air concentration to immediately improve after a short term decline in co2 emissions. Maybe there is a delay.
Of course maybe something other than fossil fuel emissions is really causing the increase in co2 air concentration.
This post is just stupid. What Kevin shows is something that those who support reductions in fossil fuels need to counter . It is certainly not something arguing for co2 emission reductions.
The measurements are made at Mauna Loa. I do not believe that there is a lot of industrial activity in Hawaii. Emissions from way East and way West must take some time to mix. But there volcanoes in Hawaii and a recent one in Iceland (?) Atmospheric circulation is, indeed, complex; we better stop messing with it.
What is missing is the predictions of climate models for atmospheric concentration given a brief reduction in burning of fossil fuels. In a system that includes masses of 5+ Zg (atmosphere) and 1.4 Yg (ocean), not to mention the masses of forest, vegetation, tundra …, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the effect of changes in inputs of less than decades duration are difficult to detect.
It’s entirely possible that this single data point no more invalidates the models than did Sen. Inhofe’s snowball.
*Zg = zettagram = 10^21 g ; Yg = yottagram = 10^24 g
The issue is that the US can't really do much about it. Most of the CO2 production is in the developing world. The US only contributes about 15% of global carbon emissions. Everyone in America could give up electricity and move into mud huts and it still would not have much impact on global emissions.
The problem isn't with the developing world, it really is just with three nations.
Between the US (15%) , China (28%), and India (7%) you have half of all world emissions. Every other nation, developed or developing is in the 1-3% range.
The thing here is that per capita no other nation contributes more than the US, the US is by far the biggest culprit and the one who falls the shortest to where they should be by a big margin.
China does contribute more but it also has 19% of the world's population, while India has 18%, so between the two the two they contribute 35% of the world's emissions but account for 37% of the population. (China over produces while India is way under where they should be, but between the two they even out).
Almost every other nation on Earth is on a similar 1:1 ratio, or at worst 1:2 (like Japan or Germany). Only the US is at a completely out of whack 1:3.5 ratio.
"Everyone in America could give up electricity and move into mud huts and it still would not have much impact on global emissions."
If only they could give up large SUVs and other high guzzlers it would have a huge impact given the disproportionate rate at which it produces emissions.
Until the world sees that the biggest culprit is serious about it, not many will follow.
This is the full quote Kevin cleverly trimmed for maximum outrage:
"The increase in annual means from 2019 to 2020 (2.5 ppm) was slightly lower than the increase from 2018 to 2019, but slightly higher than the average growth rate for the past decade (2.40 ppm yr-1), despite the approximately 5.6% drop in fossil fuel CO2 emissions in 2020 due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic"
The fact that concentrations grew slower during the year that emissions went down kind of goes against the whole point of Kevin's rant. Our rate today is still higher than the average of the past decade because we have increased that rate every year, so when finally we were forced into a small 5.6% emission reduction because of a pandemic it is still not large enough to offset the average of an entire decade, but it does show that by lowering emissions the rate of CO2 growth does go down. It actually shows that by reducing emissions enough things could become less dire or reversed eventually, especially if combined with other solutions.
The problem I have with Kevin's constant desire for a silver bullet technology solution while downplaying the effect of other approaches, is that it gives people the excuse to do nothing and change nothing in the expectation that technology will sooner or later come to the rescue.
Mr. Drum, I personally love it that you consistently return to this issue. There is no way out of our global warming predicament that doesn't include massive contraction of everything human, including population (never mind every other species on Earth). The evidence for this is overwhelming, i.e, how humans actually behave, not how we want them to or believe they should or wish they would behave. Breaking down the elements of this would be a rewarding exercise well beyond a blog comment, but looking at the arc of history when it comes to how humanity has as a whole interacted with the non-human environment, the evidence is crystal clear - for a multitude of reasons, in this context we are no different from any other species. Like any other species, and because of how uniquely and overwhelmingly successful we are at surviving and reproducing, without external constraint we WILL consume every bit of every resource available to us, and we WILL poison our environment with our waste products. Again, the historical evidence for this is unvarying and crystal clear.
We're just not capable (yet), as a species, of self limiting behavior. It's going to take multiple catastrophic contractions for our sociocultural DNA to 'learn' the internally imposed constraints that will hopefully, some day, allow us to live within the limits of our environment. Until those lessons are forcibly burned into our collective consciousness we WILL, one way or another, continue to do what we've done for the past 200,000 years.
In the meantime, folks who can see beyond the horizon have an obligation to think about and work towards what sustainable humanity might look like. Lots of folks doing this; what's missing is a ground level, intuitive ‘knowing’, for every human being, of what we can and cannot do if we're going to live within the constraints of our environment. And unfortunately, because of who and what we really are as a species, that's going to take multiple catastrophic external forcings that will force radical changes in every dimension of what we think it means to be human.
I’m quite a bit more optimistic about sustainability. I recently disposed of many kilograms of LP’s (and some 78’s!) that had been stashed under the stairs for decades. Vastly more music can now be stored, with better fidelity, on a tiny chip of the second-most abundant element in Earth’s crust. (Vinyl is a petrochemical)
Think of all the single-use devices that smartphones and computers replace, or reduce the need for. The biggest in the near future will be transportation, as working-from-anywhere and on-demand ride services increase, and live tracking makes public transit more convenient.
I see a lot of development of mixed-use structures, with poured-concrete ground floors for retail and offices, and stick-built upper floors for residential use; wood is renewable and sequesters carbon.
We need to develop renewable feedstocks to replace petroleum for plastics and chemicals. We need to develop a broad spectrum of materials that can be economically re-used and/or recycled. I don’t think these are out of reach; we just haven’t devoted the resources to these areas until recently.
In short, the most feasible way forward is through improving the efficiency with which we use natural resources. Population growth slows in advanced economies; and developing economies can continue to advance, if they can be assisted to adopt more sustainable, efficient technology.
These jokes who drive rolling coal pickups see another hurricane or the fires in California and they think they're the butterfly effect, that every time they switch on their stupid contrivance it ends up as a hurricane somewhere.
We'll be doing something about it when these cancerous parasites go to prison, not for rolling coal, but because they're jackasses.
When it's too late to matter.
Duh.
Long-time reader of your blog and the first time making a comment. Thank you for plotting the growth of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere although it would probably be better to use ppm instead of % since the annual growth directly reflects the total CO2 emission that ends up in the atmosphere beyond the natural yearly oscillation from vegetation. I produced the exact same plot earlier this year since I found the CO2 emission data quite unreliable and incomplete.The unrelenting acceleration of the CO2 growth also undermines the statements that we are making progress as was made in today's NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/25/climate/world-climate-pledges-cop26.html).
I overlaid my graph with the growth in world population (sorry, I couldn't figure out how to insert the graph). If nothing else changes the annual growth of CO2 should be proportional to the world population. This is indeed the case except the annual CO2 growth actually growths a little faster than the population. This could be because the standard of living and therefore energy use is increasing in developing countries. Reduced use of nuclear power in Europe and Japan could also contribute. It certainly doesn't show that the world is making progress with switching to sun and wind.
Define "us" and "we"
The United States has enormous reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas.
Germany has coal.
Canada has tar sands.
Norway has North Sea oil.
China has vast coal reserves.
Mexico has offshore oil.
The entire Middle East is swimming on a lake of oil.
Russia has natural gas.
Britain has North Sea oil and . . . coal?
Etc.
India might be in the list too.
Pingback: Media Patrol … | Homeless on the High Desert
........Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization..........
From an article in Wikki
It's a phenomena that we cannot change. We can add to it certainly like we are now. We can adapt to it.
But its' clear WE as in this generation, or the next or the next WILL NOT SEE IT.
That does NOT make what we are doing any better or worse.
It is a global calamity.
For centuries the global economy has relied on the United States whether it was for food, clothing or yes, protection during war times. This has caused the U.S. to be at the forefront of technological and industrial development to help feed, clothe and protect the world. YES - that makes us the biggest polluter as well.
But as the world has begun to catch up to us AND at the same time the worlds population has exploded we find ourselves at a cross roads of sorts.
Yes we HAVE been the worlds biggest polluter - but now? With China's population explosion we see that China is building more and more coal burning electric generating stations, and is still using coal to heat homes in rural areas.
We need to temper our argument that per capita the US is the main culprit because those numbers are undergoing rapid change for the IMMEDIATE future. We also need to see what NET changes we can affect.
If we all switched to electric cars AT ONCE what type of power plants would we build to increase the supply of electricity? If we DECREASE carbon generated by electric auto's by for esample 2 gigaton but the mining and processing of lithium, cobalt and other metals along with electric generating pollution goes up by half a gigaton the NET affect is reducing carbon by half a gigaton - and all we will do is delay the inevitable not prevent it. And we will STILL be raping Mother Earth of the minerals needed to make all those batteries.
And China will STILL be burning coal for heat and lights.
There are no easy answers and the numbers are skewed against us for the US advances in technology and industrialization that has helped feed and clothe the world. The numbers don't lie, we are the worst but the world has benefited from those carbon numbers not JUST the United States
sorry hate word press if we reduce emissions by 2 GT and use 1GT for electric generating we've only decreased carbon by 1GT.
Need more coffee