Most CO2 emissions were in the last 30 years

https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-since-1751-emitted-in-the-last-30-years/

by myroon5 • 2 years ago

49 55 2 years ago

ieep.eu

baking• 2 years ago

Graph goes from zero to 24 to 26. No thanks.

pwagland2• 2 years ago

Are you talking about this graph? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

You might be talking about the graph on https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-frumhoff/global-warming-fact-c... , however that page has a missing image, so I cannot see that graph.

Not sure which other graph you might be talking about?

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

Well, since the article didn't bother displaying the graph on my browser (that's the kind of thing quality sites do!), I got to the source, and it's not as bad:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...

I always assumed this was common knowledge.

FrustratedMonky3• 2 years ago

Not as bad at displaying the graph? Or the graph itself of CO2 isn't as bad as you thought it would be? It looks exponential.

sundvor• 2 years ago

For me it reads as:

0-24-26-28-30-25-32-34-36.

What the actual?

Page is https://ieep.eu/news/co2-emissions-need-to-be-reduced-twice-... , as linked ("here") from HN's link (https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin...) at the time I'm making this reply: "This graph was recently updated to include emissions from 2020 and projected emissions for 2021. The new graph can be found here. ".

bmitc2• 2 years ago

Yea, the 25 is bizarre and makes reading this impossible without a correction.

_3u105• 2 years ago

The bumper harvests due to crops growing in a greenhouse like environment will be thanks to the foresight of past leaders.

mitthrowaway2• 2 years ago

Crops do need water, too, not just CO2.

_3u105• 2 years ago

Does a warmer climate put more or less water into the atmosphere? It even rained in California this year.

https://www.wired.com/story/why-rain-is-getting-fiercer-on-a...

yareal6• 2 years ago

What a preposterously unscientific comment. Plants need CO2, we all learn this in grade school, but it's not like plants can just infinitely scale better with more CO2.

Since 1980 we've seen a degree and a half warming, which is rapid enough to damage many ecosystems. And we've increased the ppm of co2 from 338 to 421. That's not a lot of ppm for plants to radically increase their output (we don't see 20% increases in yields, despite carbon going up). But it is devastating ecologically over the short term.

To see any sort of crop impact we'd basically have to raise co2 levels to the point that they'd cause cognitive impact on humans, disrupt weather patterns, decrease arable land, and reduce rainfall.

_3u105• 2 years ago

So plants grow better in warmer and more CO2 rich environments? Aka. Greenhouse like environments?

NASA agrees with me, so it’s a very scientific comment.

https://www.nasa.gov/technology/nasa-study-rising-carbon-dio....

For most crops the saturation point will be reached at about 1,000–1,300 ppm under ideal circumstances. A lower level (800–1,000 ppm) is recommended for raising seedlings (tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers) as well as for lettuce production.

https://www.ontario.ca/page/supplemental-carbon-dioxide-gree...

If you followed the science instead of your feelings you’d know that global warming is a great thing for everyone on earth, biodiversity, etc. with a little foresight and an acceptable of the science we could have rainforests in London.

FrustratedMonky3• 2 years ago

The data is already 4 years old.

Not sure how many people realize the slow pace of these reports. That some of the most doom-scenario data, by the time it makes it into a report and hits a big headline, is already 5 or 10 years old.

Cumulative CO2 Emissions by world region, 1751-2017. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-.... [Accessed 24 April 2020]

Projected emissions for 2018-19 based on Global Carbon Budget 2019, by Pierre Friedlingstein, et al. (2019), Earth System Science Data, 11, 1783-1838, 2019, DOI: 10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019.

pwagland2• 2 years ago

The graph that you link to seems to have data up until 2022?

1.73 trillion tonnes cumulative in 2022. 837.92 billion tonnes cumulative in 1992.

Hence the headline "most CO₂ emissions were in the last 30 years", or at least I assume this.

FrustratedMonky3• 2 years ago

At the bottom of the report page, there were some cited sources, and it was "[Accessed 24 April 2020]".

I see. I didn't click to get the updated graph.

Source: Based on figures from Carbon Budget Project presented by Our World in Data, “Cumulative CO2 Emissions by world region, 1751-2017. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-.... [Accessed 24 April 2020] Projected emissions for 2018-19 based on Global Carbon Budget 2019, by Pierre Friedlingstein, et al. (2019), Earth System Science Data, 11, 1783-1838, 2019, DOI: 10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019. Concept based on the chart by Frumhoff, Peter. (15 December 2014) Global Warming Fact: More than Half of All Industrial CO2 Pollution Has Been Emitted Since 1988, Union of Concerned Scientists. https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-frumhoff/global-warming-fact-c...

Updated -> yes 2022

Source: Based on figures from Carbon Budget Project presented by Our World in Data, “Cumulative CO2 Emissions, 1750-2020. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-.... [Accessed 25 September 2022] 1 IPCC, 2022: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, J. Malley, (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA. doi: 10.1017/9781009157926.001. 2 Otto, Ilona M., et al. “Social Tipping Dynamics for Stabilizing Earth’s Climate by 2050.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117, no. 5, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jan. 2020, pp. 2354–65. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900577117

roenxi4• 2 years ago

This observation goes to the heart of why nobody is really listening to the climate change crowd. Most of the emissions were in the last 30 years and due to catapulting China out of poverty (and work in progress catapaulting India) [0]. There is a similarly frustrating dynamic to the anti-nuclear-power debate (which we have to pin our hopes on China also barrelling through). People get all riled up about the costs of something that is making the world so much better that the cost should be paid.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

Not sure why you were downvoted.

NavinF2• 2 years ago

A lot of people seem to downvote facts that they don't like

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why you're downvoted for stating the obvious. Another huge contribution to the rise of course is Asia outside of China.

One only needs to see the pictures from Delhi to understand what's going on with those numbers (or try to take a car close to the Taj Mahal).

Iirc, China has pledged to be carbon neutral from 2030 through 2050, so they're doing what any sensible country would do and emitting as much as they can until 2030.

yareal6• 2 years ago

The down votes are because it's not a thoughtful interpretation. Chinas population is whole integer multiples of the US population. And the while the growth is important, so is the area under the curve. The U.S. has been pumping out emissions the whole time, while China is just now reaching the same total output.

Hikikomori5• 2 years ago

While China is going up and US slowly going down, the US does not look very good per capita or cumulative (4% of the world's population with 25% of total emissions cumulative). What would it look like if manufacturing and transport of goods were added to the destined country?

Edit: what you said isn't even true according to your own graph. Both US and China emitted roughly 200B tons since 1990.

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

This study says human activity contributed just 12% of global CO2. I guess both can be true though.

https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Fulltext/2022/02000/...

Why the downvotes? Is there a flaw in this study?

Hikikomori5• 2 years ago

Read some comments on that paper. Like https://pure.rug.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/651497915/Comment_...

"On the basis of the several arguments presented here, we conclude that the paper of Skrable et al. (2022) should be retracted in its entirety."

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

Thanks for the response. Are there other studies that have tried to find this number?

kkfx• 2 years ago

Hum... Surely the immense mass of burned oil does much BUT in the past humans heat their homes en mass with wood and coal, I doubt these emissions count such little amount.

Aside if you tell me that burning oil is far more polluting than burning wood that's another story, but in formal CO₂ terms...

TheSmiddy• 2 years ago

The population right now is 4x what it was 100 years ago which itself was 2x what it was 100 years before that. so even if our per capita emissions haven't grown (they have, drastically) the graph of total emissions would still be stacked towards the present.

jvm___• 2 years ago

The wood you burn was grown within your lifetime, your parents lifetime, or maybe their parents.

Coal and gas are millions of years old.

We wouldn't have a problem of we only burnt wood for energy, but we wouldn't have our modern society either.

virgildotcodes• 2 years ago

The scale of our consumption and emissions as an industrialized global society of 8 billion dramatically outpaces our consumption and emissions as a pre industrial society of far fewer people.

Hikikomori5• 2 years ago

There's a lot more people now.

daemonologist• 2 years ago

As has been pointed out, there are a lot more people (and therefore a lot more houses, offices, etc.) now than even 30 years ago. Per-capita emissions are also much higher

- US, China, and UK emissions per capita since 1751: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-CO2-per-capit... (data: https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V... )

This is unsurprising - though heating and cooking require a significant amount of energy even in the modern day, they only account for 23% of global energy usage (https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2019/heat). The largest energy user is transportation (35%) followed by manufacturing (20%) (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/largest-end-u...), neither of which were probably much of a factor in the pre-industrial world.

ianburrell• 2 years ago

Everyone has pointed out the scale but there are two other reasons why is different.

First, burning wood is carbon neutral. The tree pulled it from the air and burning returns to the air.

Second, there are natural processes that absorb carbon and keep system in a balance. Trees are one, plankton is another, and longer term is rock weathering. Even if the ancestor were using coal, the absorption processes could keep up with the small amount.

el_don_almighty• 2 years ago

Burning oil is what? CO2 time travel from the past?

bilsbie4• 2 years ago

Always blows my mind to realize that CO2 makes up just 0.04% of the atmosphere. Just a surprisingly super-powered molecule.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

And CO2 is just one of many pollutants.

canadiantim• 2 years ago

Keep in mind, CO2 is the basis of life on this earth, as carbon-based organisms. It's not the molecule itself that is a pollutant, it's the dosage.

ipaddr• 2 years ago

Calling it a pollutant misunderstands its natural role and it's importance. Planets transform CO2 into oxygen that you breathe. Acting like it is a pollutant that needs to be removed when all plant and animal life depends on it is foolish.

dohello1• 2 years ago

I wonder how much it's gone up in just the last 10 years

wkat42422• 2 years ago

How so? What happened?

bmitc2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't have expected otherwise.

whatever1• 2 years ago

In the 80's the global population was roughly 4B and half of these (2B) were in extreme poverty.

Today we have almost double the global population and less than 1B in extreme poverty.

Given that the biggest chunk of the emissions in the last 30 years came from nonOECD countries I don't see what the alternative was.

Force the poor countries to starve to death and not use cheap fossils to feed their people?

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Wow. I did not expect that. Especially during WWII a LOT of oil must have been burned. I always thought that would have been the peak.

candiodari• 2 years ago

Which doesn't matter at all because once CO2 is released, getting it back out is utterly beyond human capabilities. Not 1y out, not 10y out, 100+ years out, maybe impossible.

So we won't be doing that.

Which seems to mean, climate engineering, here we come ... But it's not so easy.

Cooling the planet is easy. Heating it is the hard thing. In an emergency, we could undo 130+ years of global warming in a few hours, with nukes, without advance warning. And given a few months to a few years we could use much more subtle methods too.

Of course, cooling would make REALLY large pieces of land unliveable. And ... in warm climates you have energy available. You can fight the effects of warming locally, even in a single house, which humans have been doing since before history began. Fighting cooling ... only possible if you bring your own energy. Cooling is much worse than warming.

So in the long term the evolution of thought is even more funny. We COULD cool the planet. We'll doubtless figure out a few ways to do it. We have already figured out one or two ways, though they could be more subtle. Maybe even one or two really good ways. Then, we'll research the implications better, and find that given the choice between cooling and warming ...

We'll take the warming over the cooling, given the choice. Even just cooling back to the levels of the beginning of the 20th century would be far worse than 2 or even 5 degree warming. And the limit of what the climate anomaly, also called global warming, probably isn't even 5 degrees warmer than 1850. What burning all fossil fuels (including coal) could induce is not quite 5 degrees. Unthinkable (but historically occurred) levels of volcanic activity can get us close to 8 degrees warming, but humans can't.

If you look it up, by the way, you'll find that solar power, no matter which method is used, is MUCH better at cooling the planet than forests, oceans, steppes, deserts, ... just about any place where you might build solar power.

So we could see the ultimate joke. We may cool the planet WAY too much by accident ... then find we're forced to find ways to artificially heat the planet again!

The problem with the current viewpoint is it's very basis. The view that nature is good for humans, is good for itself. Of course, this is bullshit. Nature doesn't care. Ironically, Gaia is often associated with the view that nature will provide. What did the mythical godess Gaia actually do? She fought to protect her children, the titans, who killed entire countries with their entire population and left desolate, lifeless places behind, against Zeus. Funny, that.

Nature doesn't care and will kill us all. The question is when, but that it will is a complete certainty.

Most CO2 emissions were in the last 30 years

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