Carbon Dioxide.
There has been a steady but increasing release of C02 due to the use of fossil fuels in almost every aspect of the world’s economy. When I was a child living in the UK during and after WWII we used coal in our fireplace to heat the house and the water for bathing. Heating was from a fireplace in our small livingroom and that fireplace also heated our water when it was turned on for our weekly bathing. Later we lived in a house with fireplaces in two of the three bedroom thus providing a modicum of heating in the upstairs bedrooms but the upstairs fireplace was only lit when the windows were covered in ice on the inside. In that time frame coal was used extensively throughout the world to heat and cook. Today, in the USA, most people shower daily and have HVAC systems. Such amenities are available in many parts of the world although roughly half of the worlds population do not. The next graph shows atmospheric C02 over the last 60 years or so taken from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where the modern carbon dioxide record began in 1958. The annual average carbon dioxide in 2022 was 418.56 ppm an increase of over 100ppm.
There has been a steady but increasing release of C02 due to the use of fossil fuels in almost every aspect of the world’s economy. When I was a child living in the UK during and after WWII we used coal in our fireplace to heat the house and the water for bathing. Heating was from a fireplace in our small livingroom and that fireplace also heated our water when it was turned on for our weekly bathing. Later we lived in a house with fireplaces in two of the three bedroom thus providing a modicum of heating in the upstairs bedrooms but the upstairs fireplace was only lit when the windows were covered in ice on the inside. In that time frame coal was used extensively throughout the world to heat and cook. Today, in the USA, most people shower daily and have HVAC systems. Such amenities are available in many parts of the world although roughly half of the worlds population do not. The next graph shows atmospheric C02 over the last 60 years or so taken from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, where the modern carbon dioxide record began in 1958. The annual average carbon dioxide in 2022 was 418.56 ppm an increase of over 100ppm.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and while it has a much smaller effect than that of the water vapor it does provide some warming. As the CO2 in the atmosphere increases so does that heating effect. If you compare the above figure to that shown in the section titled In the last Century the Earth has heated up 1.3 degrees centigrade you will note a remarkable similarity between these two figures from about 1960 to today. AS THE CO2 INCREASES SO DOES THE EARTH'S TEMPERATURE.
While the increase in CO2 is not the only factor driving the worlds temperature it is clearly correlated.
Where does all this CO2 come from?
The following chart taken from "OurWorldinData" shows annual CO2 emissions by regions of the world. The world is currently releasing over 35 billion tons annually. In recent years China's releases have been increasing and they are the largest today. The second largest is the US which on this scale appears to be almost constant. In the next section we will see more details.
Asia is increasing. India is small but also increasing. Africa and South America are very small but can be expected to increase simply because they will need to increase energy per capita to combat the increasing temperatures of the world.
Europe is clearly decreasing largely due to their efforts to replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy systems like winf and solar energy.
It is not my intention to discuss these trends country by country in detail. Our World in Data does a far better job than what I can do here. I do want to look a little further into what is likely to happen over the next 20 or 30 years so that we can think about a realistic view of the future of the planet.
The following figure, also taken from Our World in Data, shows an estimate of the cumulative emissions of Carbon Dioxide over the last two hundred years. Clearly these are not entirely accurate but the impact of the industrial revolution which had started in earnest in the UK by 1900, followed and taken over by that in the US in the twentieth century is evident. Then the surprising, to some, of the acceleration of the industrialization in China in the late twentieth and now the twentfirst century. One could argue that the US should be held responsible for almost 25% of the damaging effects of Climate Change world wide. China, it could be argued, might be responsible for more than 10% and the UK for a mere 6 or 7%.
One could extract the data from OurWorldinData for all Nations and assign responsibilities.
Recently, some nations, India included have expressed their desire to be part of the mitigation efforts world wide provided that those who caused the problems in the first place pay for the piper.
Before moving on to discussing other greenhouse gases I want to understand, for the USA, what might be done to reduce emissions. The next graph shows CO2 emissions per capita for the nations shown on the above graph. Again this was downloaded courtesy of OurWorldinData.
In 2021 the US emitted about 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's you, me, our children and our children's children. How does one person emit 15 tons of CO2?