The launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed today. Nature News has the story. This must be incredibly frustrating for everyone who worked on the project, or anticipated using the data.
Tag Archive for 'CO2'
Found this bit, under the headline Carbon Dioxide Levels Rising Despite Economic Downturn:
A leading scientist said on Thursday that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are hitting new highs, providing no indication that the world economic downturn is curbing industrial emissions, Reuters reported.
Joe Romm does a good job explaining why conflating emissions with concentrations is a mistake. I’ll just add the visual:
And the data to go with it:
It would indeed take quite a downturn to bring the blue (emissions) below the red (uptake), which is what would have to happen to see a dip in the CO2 atmospheric content (green). In fact, the problem is tougher than it looks, because a fall in emissions would be accompanied by a fall in net uptake, due to the behavior of short-term sinks. Notice that atmospheric CO2 kept going up after the 1929 crash. (Interestingly, it levels off from about 1940-1945, but it’s hard to attribute that because it appears to be within natural variability).
At the moment, it’s kind of odd to look for the downturn in the atmosphere when you can observe fossil fuel consumption directly. The official stats do involve some lag, but less than waiting for natural variability to shake out of sparse atmospheric measurements. Things might change soon, though, with the advent of satellite measurements.
For the Pangaea model, colleagues have been compiling a useful table of international emissions commitments. That will let us test whether, if fulfilled, those commitments move the needle on global atmospheric GHG concentrations and temperatures (currently they don’t).
I’ve been looking for the equivalent for US states, and found it at Pew Climate. It’s hard to get a mental picture of the emissions trajectory implied by the various commitments in the table, so I combined them with emissions data from EPA (fossil fuel CO2 only) to reconcile all the variations in base years and growth patterns.
The history of emissions from 1990 to 2005, plus future commitments, looks like this:
Note that some states have committed to “long term” reductions, without a specific date, which are shown above just beyond 2050. There’s a remarkable amount of variation in 1990-2005 trends, ranging from Arizona (up 55%) to Massachusetts (nearly flat).
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