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June 29, 2023
By Jeffrey Kluger
Watch One Year Of Carbon Emissions Take Over The Planet
It’s hard to miss something that weighs 37
billion tons—especially when it’s all around us. Thirty-seven billion
tons is
the amount of fossil-fuel-related carbon
dioxide humans release into the atmosphere every year. We see the
damage it does everywhere—from heat waves to floods to droughts to
wildfires and more. But the CO2 itself? Entirely invisible. Until now.
In a striking new video, NASA
has made visible the production—and, in some cases, absorption—of
human-produced carbon dioxide for the entirety of the year 2021. Over
that period, the CO2 in the atmosphere rose
by 2.13 parts per million (PPM), marking the eleventh year in a
row in which the increase exceeded 2 PPM. The most dramatic takeaway
from the video is the outsized
role the northern hemisphere plays in the global spread of greenhouse
gasses, compared to the far less blameworthy south.
Space agency scientists drew the data for their video partly from
observations made by weather satellites, including NASA’s GOES-17,
the European Union’s Meteosat,
and Japan’s GMS.
Other information came from Earth-based monitoring of known greenhouse
gas emitters—industrial areas in the developed world in particular,
but also smaller contributions made by, say, the burning of crop waste
in Africa. This data was fed into NASA’s Goddard
Earth Observing System (GEOS), a computer-modeling tool that can
turn raw information into eye-popping imagery—and in this case GEOS
worked stunningly.
The model assigned four colors to the video it produced: orange
represents fossil fuel emissions, red represents burning biomass,
green represents land ecosystems, and blue represents the ocean.
Read more: The
Selfish Case for Climate Justice
The video unspools over the course of the year and it is not until
June that the
south is truly shrouded in the north’s emissions. It takes that
long partly because the equator operates as sort of an atmospheric
berm, with hot air rising from the earth’s midline slowing north-south
circulation. Ultimately, however, those billions of tons of carbon
dioxide blow past this natural stop sign and cover the south as badly
as the north.
For the first half of the year, before they’re obscured by CO2,
Australia, Africa, and South America appear to flicker on and off from
green to a neutral gray. That represents plant life absorbing carbon
dioxide during the day and releasing it in a sort of vegetable
respiration at night. The crop fires in Africa are visible too, and
while these are relatively small contributors of CO2, they build up
over time, because if the land is not fully replanted each season, it
can alter the overall ecosystem’s ability to sequester atmospheric
carbon.
If there is any good news in both the data and the video, it’s that
not all of the CO2 tonnage humans pour into the air stays in
the air. About half of the emissions are taken up by the land and the
oceans, which act as carbon sinks, entraining the greenhouse gas and
preventing it from accelerating climate
change even further. The bad news is that there’s at least another
37 billion tons coming this year—and next year and the year after
that. Until humans break their fossil-fuel habit, the planet will
continue to choke on the results.
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