carbon dioxide – Page 5 – Desdemona Despair

Aerial view of JERA's Hekinan thermal coal power station in Hekinan, central Japan on 18 October 2021. Picture taken October 18, 2021. Photo: Yuka Obayashi / REUTERS

November 6, 2021

COP26 aims to banish coal. Asia is building hundreds of power plants to burn it – “You can have the cake of coal and an icing of solar”

By Sudarshan Varadhan and Aaron Sheldrick31 October 2021 UDANGUDI, India/TOKYO (Reuters) – On the coastline near India’s southern tip, workers toil on a pier carrying a conveyor belt that cuts a mile into the Indian Ocean where the azure waters are deep enough for ships to berth and unload huge cargoes of coal. The belt […]

Global Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) capacity, 2010-2020. Twenty years ago, the fossil fuel industry told you that by today, CCS would capture 5,000 million tons of CO2 per year. Today, the world can barely capture 10. Which is so far off target you can’t even see it on this graph. And when you remember that our global emissions are 36 BILLION tonnes each year, even if it had met its target, it would contribute approximately FUCK ALL. Data: IEA. Graphic: The Juice Media

September 3, 2021

Honest Government Ad: Carbon Capture and Storage – “CCS is a complex mining process whereby fossil fuel companies inject donations into the arseholes of politicians to delay climate action”

1 September 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien Government with an important announcement as we enter the next stage of the climate crisis: MASSIVE FIRES, MASSIVE FLOODS, MASSIVE BULLSHIT. As things fall apart and calls grow for us to urgently reduce our emissions we’ve come up with a PR campaign – […]

Time series of climate-related responses to anthropogenic drivers, 1990-2020. Out of the 31 tracked planetary vital signs, 18 were at new all-time record lows or highs in 2020. Data obtained before and after the publication of Ripple and colleagues (2020) are shown in gray and red respectively. For variables with relatively high variability, local regression trend lines are shown in black. The variables were measured at various frequencies (e.g., annual, monthly, weekly). The labels on the x-axis correspond to midpoints of years. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in the supplemental material. Graphic: Ripple, et al., 2021 / BioScience

July 31, 2021

World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021 – Humans face untold suffering from “the consequences of unrelenting business as usual”

28 July 2021 (BioScience) – In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of […]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from China and OECD nations, 1990-2019. In 2019, China’s GHG emissions passed the 14 gigaton threshold for the first time, reaching 14,093 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMt CO2e). This represents a more than tripling of 1990 levels, and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. As a result, China’s share of the 2019 global emissions total of 52 gigatons rose to 27 percent. Data: Rhodium Group / UNFCCC. Graphic: Rhodium Group

July 8, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the developed world for the first time in 2019

By Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser 6 May 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Each year Rhodium Group provides the most up-to-date global and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates through the ClimateDeck (a partnership with Breakthrough Energy). In addition to our preliminary US and China GHG estimates for 2020, Rhodium provides annual estimates of economy-wide emissions—including all […]

Graph showing Earth Overshoot Day, 1970-2021. Each year, Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year. Humanity currently uses 74% more than what the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate—or “1.7 Earths.” From Earth Overshoot Day until the end of the year, humanity operates on ecological deficit spending. This spending is currently some of the largest since the world entered into ecological overshoot in the early 1970s, according to the National Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts (NFA) based on UN datasets. Graphic: Global Footprint Network

June 20, 2021

Earth Overshoot Day creeps back to July 29 in 2021 – “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota of the Earth’s biological resources for 2021 by July 29th”

GLASGOW, UK, 4 June 2021 (Global Footprint Network) – Earth Overshoot Day 2021 lands on July 29, Councillor Susan Aitken, the Leader of Glasgow City Council, announced today on behalf of Global Footprint Network and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). “With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota […]

Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory, 1958-2021. This graph depicts the upward trajectory of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory by NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The annual fluctuation is known as the Keeling Curve. Graphic: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

June 20, 2021

Coronavirus barely slows rising carbon dioxide – Atmospheric CO2 peaks near 420 parts per million in 2021

7 June 2021 (NOAA) – Atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked for 2021 in May at a monthly average of 419 parts per million (ppm), the highest level since accurate measurements began 63 years ago, scientists from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced today. […]

Abstract in video format for the paper titled: "Global changes in oceanic mesoscale currents over the satellite altimetry record", Martinez Moreno, J., Hogg, A. McC., England, M. H., Constantinou, N. C., Kiss, A. E., and Morrison, A. K. (2021) Global changes in oceanic mesoscale currents over the satellite altimetry record, 22 Apr 2021. Video: Martinez Moreno, et al., 2021 / Nature Climate Change

April 25, 2021

Changes to giant ocean eddies could have “devastating effects” globally – Scientists find “a global-scale reorganization of the ocean’s energy over the past three decades”

By Graham Readfearn 22 April 2021 (The Guardian) – Twirling and meandering ocean currents that help shape the world’s climate have gone through a “global-scale reorganisation” over the past three decades, according to new research. The amount of energy in these ocean currents, which can be from 10km to 100km across and are known as […]

Global monthly mean atmospheric CO2, 1980-2020. These graphs shows the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Graphic: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

April 11, 2021

Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020 – Carbon dioxide levels now higher than any time in past 3.6 million years – Largest annual methane increase ever recorded

7 April 2021 (NOAA) – Levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response, NOAA announced today. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was […]

Monthly evolution of global CO2 emissions in 2020, relative to 2019. After hitting a low in April 2020, global emissions rebounded strongly and rose above 2019 levels in December. Global CO2 emissions were 2 percent, or 60 million tonnes, higher in December 2020 than they were in the same month a year earlier. Major economies led the resurgence as a pick-up in economic activity pushed energy demand higher and significant policies measures to boost clean energy were lacking. Many economies are now seeing emissions climbing above pre-crisis levels. Graphic: IEA

March 27, 2021

After steep drop in early 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions have rebounded strongly – “The rebound in global carbon emissions is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide”

2 March 2021 (IEA) – The Covid-19 crisis in 2020 triggered the largest annual drop in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions since the Second World War, according to IEA data released today, but the overall decline of about 6% masks wide variations depending on the region and the time of year. After hitting a low in […]

10,000 years of carbon dioxide. Due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have now risen by about 50 percent% above the preindustrial level. At recent rates of growth, we would reach double the preindustrial by around the year 2075. Graphic: Dr. Robert Rohde

March 21, 2021

Graph of the Day: 10,000 years of carbon dioxide

Dr. Robert Rohde 17 March 2021 (Twitter) – Due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have now risen about 50 percent above the preindustrial level. At recent rates of growth, we would reach double the preindustrial by around 2075. Dr. Robert Rohde on Twitter