Global Climate Change: Something Has To Give


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This post was orginally published at EcoWorldly

In an excellent post, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times dot Earth blog poses the question - “Where would carbon dioxide emissions be if everyone on Earth was using fossil fuels at the same pace, per capita, as the United States is now?”

Using some simple math, Revkin presents some not so surprising facts:

It’s simple multiplication. Right now, the sum of global emissions of carbon dioxide by 6.6 billion very-unequal humans is about 29 billion tons a year. (An excellent database is here on historic and current emissions, from energy and cement making.)

If everyone was emitting at the British level, it’d be 66 billion tons a year. Okay, let’s try the United States. That would be 132 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year, if everyone on Earth had an equal carbon footing.

We spent a couple of minutes with Excel and a global emissions database to put some of these figures into a global perspective:


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Revkin sums up this situation perfectly:

So clearly something has to give, presuming the countries of the world are serious about accepting the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which they all did, ostensibly, last year).

In doing so, Revkin asks the question that after much discussion remains unanswered: what’s going to give?

Further reading:

Andrew Revkin - dot Earth, Millennium Development Goals Indicators, Trends Compendium of Data on Global Climate Change

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March 6th, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Danny Bloom
Posted on:
March 6, 2008 at 8:56 am

Mark,

I am using this space, if your moderators will allow me, to announce to your readers and whoever else surfs on by, the start of the international Vaclav Klaus Climate Joke Awards here:

http://climatejokeawards.blogspot.com

They ”honor” (sic) people who say stupid things about the climate crisis. The awards are satire. Then again, maybe they aren’t satire. The page is up now and running and we are accepting nominations via the comment section throught the year, anytime you spot a good quote, send it in. Cheers,

db

PS: if you want to do a separate blog one day on the awards blog, please feel free to do so.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Red Team - Daryl
Posted on:
March 7, 2008 at 6:41 am

The IPCC target is 6 Billion but the same body tells us the natural sinking ability of the planet is 3.3 Billion Tonnes, from their own report.

So they are saying it is ok to produce double the CO2?

Now lets look at this at 6 Billion tonnes as a per Capita Number it is about 925 Kg per person per year, decreasing with population each year.

I do not think that is even possible looking at the histrorical numbers provided. Unless we give up that pesky fire nuisance. Even burning wood pellets and dung you will surpass the IPCC level.

All the mitigation projections are based on the assumption that we will develop a way to sequester CO2 beyond our emissions, or in lay terms develop atmospheric processing technology.

So no matter how much we reduce emissions CO2 will rise until we can perfect this. Reducing fossil fuel consumption will have no effect at all on reversing the trend or even slowing it down by any measurable amount.

So if you believe in the evil of CO2 you better hope some scientists a whole lot smarter than climatologists get this figured out.