Carbon Dioxide Production Much Faster than Originally Anticipated
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 10.23.07
About all that carbon dioxide we've been spewing into the atmosphere - yeah, it's worse than we thought. That seems to be the main take-away message of a new study by an international team of researchers that found that current carbon dioxide production levels have been far exceeding the already pessimistic estimates being used by models to predict future climate trends.
A booming world economy has caused atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to rise by a whopping 1.93 ppm a year - the fastest rate of increase since monitoring began in 1959. Just to give some context, carbon dioxide concentrations rose by an average of 1.58 ppm during the 1980s and an average of 1.49 ppm during the 1990s (hardly quiescent decades, economically-speaking).
"[The paper presents] a consistent picture of the increasing accumulation of atmospheric CO2 and, hence, the increasing urgency to do something about it. Just because the last 7 years have shown accelerating trends does not mean that the next 7 or 50 or 100 will be the same. But they are what they are, and we need to pay attention," said S. Randy Kawa, a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
As Gregg Marland, the study's co-author, noted during a recent interview, it "will be important to keep watch over the next few years to see if the changing trend is a continuing one." Given our past track record, there is unfortunately little reason to expect that trend to stop any time soon.
Via ::ScienceNOW: Planet's CO2 Production Surges (news website)
See also: ::Oceans No Longer as Effective at Storing Carbon Dioxide, ::Never Mind Future Temperature Increases: CO2 Emissions Deserve EPA's Attention NOW
Image courtesy of cjohnson7 via flickr
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noo, that is not good news :( ..scary picture too!
Damn right, scary. Just when we need to be reducing....we're not even staying still....we're increasing the rate of increase :(
it is important to "watch these changes" to see if our emissions, as a human collective continue to 'increase the rate of increase'.
watching, understanding and analysing is critical but the whole point of doing that is so that we know what change to enact and how. i vote for strong political pressure, urgency and intellectual rigour over ethical consumption and consumerism. demand strong restrictions on polluting activities and industry, don't ask or offer carrot. let's stop wasting space asking people to change their lightbulbs lets just legislate for inefficient bulbs to not be produced and sold.
Even if our personal efforts to live sustainably are offset by industrial giants and less-concerned individuals, it's good practice for a future that may not offer another choice of lifestyle. Seriously. Whether our personal efforts amass to climate stability or not, the days of using as much of whatever we want as often as we please are over.
why did I just hear about CO2 emmisions rising slower for the year 2006? Can someone back me up on this?
why did I just hear about CO2 emmisions rising slower for the year 2006? Can someone back me up on this?
Tim, CO2 emissions in the US actually decreased in 2006, but China surpassed us in 2006, easily mitigating any slight improvement the US made.
Let's see what a co2 level chart looks like for a period of time that is meaningful, so people see the truth about where the earth has been and where it is going. Lets try something like a one million year chart that shows co2 levels. We have that capability, now lets see the real truth and put the alarmists to bed. All of this oil we are consumming came from a period when co2 levels were in the multi-thousands, and plants grew in huge sizes. The earth survived then as it will now.