A graphical look at worldwide CO2 numbers

FergalR says:
November 23, 2012 at 3:31 pm
“for the last few years and planned several years in the future China’s building the equivalent of the entire UK’s generating capacity in coal-fired plant – every year. 1.25GW a weeK”
China built 30 GW of coal fired plant in the first 10 months of 2012. 30/42 = A rate of about .71 GW/week. They have announced 28 GW more nuclear, 80 GW more hydro, 43 GW more wind and 19 GW more solar in the next 3 years. They have not announced how much coal fired power plant they will build. Any report that says otherwise is speculation.The Chinese 2015 Energy Plan was last updated in October 2012. There was no quantification about how much more coal fired capacity was expected. The build rate is slowing as well as the utilization rate of existing capacity. You be sure they won’t sacrifice economic growth…but they don’t know what economic growth will be over the 3 years.
jmrsudbury says:
November 24, 2012 at 3:29 am
“The diagram is from a March 2008 DOE report, but I don’t know what year the numbers represent: It has human emissions at 9 gigatons per year. Are the graphs in this post supposed to be metric gigatonnes?”
CO2 emissions are 3.67 times Carbon Emissions. (We need to include the weight of the Oxygen in the CO2….getting the 2 confused can create quite alarming results)

@MDH
>…I have only ever seen these meters indicate Oxygen at between 19% AND 21% and CO2 at 0ppm unless breathed on with cupped hands.Any explanation?
The personal exposure meter (PEM) is calibrated to show 0 ppm with a background of 392. It is easy. They feed in ordinary air and tell the machine that is a zero ppm level. It is quite common to calibrate in this manner because it automatically subtracts the background level. Then the ambient air to which the wearer is exposed shows as a deviation from the background.

I see it all, CO2 emissions from China cause cooling, using the same logic as team global warming. There is correlation here, global temps slow and then fall as the cooling CO2 from China equals and then overpowers the warming CO2 from the dreaded round eyes.
So ,again IPCC/UN logic, we in the West must burn every heavy CO2 producing fuel we can find or the Chinese CO2 will plunge us into an ice age.
This is impeccable alarmist logic, I expect all enviro-( self-snip) to rush out and buy the biggest SUV you can afford.Burn everything you can, the planet must be saved.

We can be glad the IPCC is wrong. Carbon taxes, carbon caps, carbon credits, and any other crazy carbon schemes wouldn’t make a difference big enough to satisfy their models. The entire world economy would have to be practically shut down. If Obama is serious about reducing carbon emissions he should ask the Fed to raise interest rates. The Fed could put the brakes on the economy with out passing any new laws. Can China keep finding enough carbon to burn even more?

From the policy makers point of view the clear message of this piece is;
As it is blindingly obvious that emissions flat line once a certain level of development is reached then, if CO2 must be controlled at all, our efforts should be on encouraging “developing” peoples to reach this level as soon as possible and not on reducing our own standards.
Off Topic PS: I was delighted this week to have witnessed the dropping of CO2 targets for the UK energy sector. Much still to be done…

Ferdinand Engelbeen says: @ur momisugly November 24, 2012 at 11:32 am
…Bob (and others…), your math is right and wrong: indeed human emissions of CO2 are some 3% of the natural emissions (97%) per year, but you forget the other side of the equation: natural sinks are 98.5% of the combined emissions, while human sinks are near unexistent. As a result, there is some 1.5% of increase in the atmosphere.
Natural emissions and sinks are simply a cycle: partly continuous between equator and poles and partly seasonal over summer and winter. At the end of the year, the net result is a net sink of CO2, in quantity about halve of the current human emissions… Thus humans are fully responsible for the increase (with a minor part from warmer sea surface temperatures since the LIA)…..
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while human sinks are near unexistent….
Let’s see if we can refute that.
#1) Lumbering.
Trees are cut down and made into furniture, structures, books and newspapers. Jim Hudson who calls himself a Garbologist gave a talk at one of the BostCon. He studies landfills. He uses old newspapers to date his excavations. In otherwords THEY DO NOT DECAY.
I am not going to bother looking it up but studies show new growth forests sequester much more CO2 than old growth CO2.
#2) Agriculture
Irrigation alone has increased the biomass in marginal areas. Liberation of CO2 has also caused an increase in plant growth world wide and C3 plants have become much more drought hardy due to the increase in CO2.
Perhaps the most critical point is brought out in this paper (Trees and most food plants are C3 not C4 so this speaks directly to food sources for humans and many other species)

Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
Ward JK, Harris JM, Cerling TE, Wiedenhoeft A, Lott MJ, Dearing MD, Coltrain JB, Ehleringer JR.
Source
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas..
Abstract
The Rancho La Brea tar pit fossil collection includes Juniperus (C3) wood specimens that 14C date between 7.7 and 55 thousand years (kyr) B.P., providing a constrained record of plant response for southern California during the last glacial period. Atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) ranged between 180 and 220 ppm during glacial periods, rose to approximately 280 ppm before the industrial period, and is currently approaching 380 ppm in the modern atmosphere. Here we report on delta13C of Juniperus wood cellulose, and show that glacial and modern trees were operating at similar leaf-intercellular [CO2](ci)/atmospheric [CO2](ca) values. As a result, glacial trees were operating at ci values much closer to the CO2-compensation point for C3 photosynthesis than modern trees, indicating that glacial trees were undergoing carbon starvation. In addition, we modeled relative humidity by using delta18O of cellulose from the same Juniperus specimens and found that glacial humidity was approximately 10% higher than that in modern times, indicating that differences in vapor-pressure deficits did not impose additional constrictions on ci/ca in the past. By scaling ancient ci values to plant growth by using modern relationships, we found evidence that C3 primary productivity was greatly diminished in southern California during the last glacial period.

Humans are returning much needed CO2 to the carbon cycle and therefore saving many species from extinction in the next glaciation. Remember plants are not dealing with just the % CO2 in the air but with the partial pressure of CO2 that decreases with elevation.
From the same study (PDF of full paper)

…While [CO2] does not vary with elevation, CO2 partial pressure decreases in proportion to total atmospheric pressure. Under modern conditions, partial pressures of CO2 at high-elevation sites are 10–30% lower than at low-elevation sites, producing an even more conservative comparison between glacial and modern conditions….

And another paper:

Impact of lower atmospheric carbon dioxide on tropical mountain ecosystems
Street-Perrott FA, Huang Y, Perrott RA, Eglinton G, Barker P, Khelifa LB, Harkness DD, Olago DO.
Source
F. A. Street-Perrott and R. A. Perrott are in the Tropical Palaeoenvironments Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. Y. Huang and G. Eglinton are at the Biogeochemistry Research C.
Abstract
Carbon-isotope values of bulk organic matter from high-altitude lakes on Mount Kenya and Mount Elgon, East Africa, were 10 to 14 per mil higher during glacial times than they are today. Compound-specific isotope analyses of leaf waxes and algal biomarkers show that organisms possessing CO2-concentrating mechanisms, including C4 grasses and freshwater algae, were primarily responsible for this large increase. Carbon limitation due to lower ambient CO2 partial pressures had a significant impact on the distribution of forest on the tropical mountains, in addition to climate. Hence, tree line elevation should not be used to infer palaeotemperatures.

Gunga Din says:
November 24, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Maybe I missed something, wouldn’t be the first time; are the countries with rising CO2 also the ones with a rising GDP? Weren’t they in, for the most part, in trouble before CAGW began to influence policy? When I say “trouble”, I mean their citizens being taken care of. How are the citizens of the countries with a dropping CO2 doing?
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In the UK:
the Office of National Statistics confirmed that there were 25,700 more deaths in the winter of 2005/06 than in other parts of the year.

December 5 2010: The number of deaths linked to cold over the four months of last winter reached nearly 28,000.
Charities claim this country has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than colder nations such as Finland and Sweden.
About half of the people forced to spend over 10 per cent of their income on energy bills – the official definition of fuel poverty – are aged over 60…. The last official figures, for 2008, showed there were 4.5 million fuel-poor households in the UK. On Friday, British Gas will raise prices for eight million customers. Millions more customers of Scottish & Southern Energy and ScottishPower have already been hit by price rises.
Last winter 70 per cent of household were forced to cut down or ration their energy use because of cost.

Officialdom blames the death on the flu:

Excess mortality among the elderly in 12 European countries, February and March 2012
…On the basis of our preliminary data, we hypothesise that the epidemiology of the impact of influenza in Europe differs in the 2011/12 season from the recent pandemic and post-pandemic seasons, with excess mortality in the elderly caused by the return of influenza A(H3N2) virus, potentially with the added effects of a cold snap…

3 February 2012: Hundreds die from the cold in eastern Europe
…According to the Ukraine Emergency Ministry’s web site, the number of deaths had risen to 63 over the past six days in Ukraine, with 945 people hospitalised with frostbite. The extreme weather has claimed 35 lives in Poland since January 24, and 22 people have died in Romania, many of them homeless, according to Realitatea TV.
The real death toll is likely to be much higher. Initial statistics concentrate on urban areas and neglect the large proportion of the population, often elderly and poor, living in the countryside. In addition, some eastern European countries do not collect statistics for such deaths….
Russia has more than 100,000 homeless, whose lives are now threatened by the cold…
The hardest-hit regions of Romania are in the east and south of the country. In Covasna County, temperatures fell to minus 31 degrees (Celsius), while the capital city Bucharest registered minus 22 degrees.
In Bulgaria, 16 cities reported the coldest temperatures for over 100 years….

The take home from this is COLD KILLS and high fuel cost helps cold kill the elderly and poverty stricken. Even the European Commission acknowledges this.

Cold spells
Deaths during heat-waves have received much media attention in recent years, and yet cold weather is even more lethal…
The EU has no official meteorological definition of cold and extreme cold. A Dutch study defines a cold spell as a period of at least 9 consecutive days in which the lowest temperature reaches –5°C or lower, including at least 6 days in which the lowest temperature touches –10°C or lower.
High-risk groups needing special attention are:
the elderly,
children (who lose heat faster due to their higher body surface/weight ratio),
people with ischemic diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke),
people with chronic respiratory diseases or asthma
Coronary heart disease, strokes and respiratory diseases are responsible for most part of excess winter deaths. Other contributing factors are influenza, social class and per capita gross national product.
Severe weather has had dramatic consequences in Europe in recent years. Institutions at all levels are now developing strategies, by learning from recent events, to mitigate the future impact of extreme weather events on health.

It is about time Officaldom started to notice their people are freezing to death.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 25, 2012 at 8:00 am
richardscourtney says:
November 24, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Indeed, we have discussed that many times… But as you know, I am convinced that the human contribution is the main (over 95%) cause of the increase, because that fits all known observations.
There are a lot of possible theoretical alternatives, but all of them fail one or more observations
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What about the increase in Sea surface temperature? (Graph of increase straight from the EPA shown here ) Oceans account for 70% of the earth’s surface and a large part of the CO2 cycle. Henry’s law and all that apply.

…The solubility of CO2 gas, and the equilibrium dissociation constants for H2CO3* vary as a function of temperature and salinity, such that a 1 ̊ increase in sea water temperature leads overall to a 4.23% increase in the equilibrium gas phase partial pressure (pCO2) of a sea water sample [Chipman et al., 1992], depending on the choice of thermodynamic constants, while a 1 ppt increase in salinity at 25 ̊ C generates a 3.2% increase in pCO2….
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.1999.rev_modeling.pdf

From 1910 to the present the EPA graph shows an increase in SST of about 1.5F (~0.8C)

However if we lived on a lifeless arid planet covered in bare rock with no ocean then the CAGW crowd might have a point. (but hang on – if it was lifeless then.. O never mind…)

Gail Combs says:
November 25, 2012 at 10:06 am
such that a 1 ̊ increase in sea water temperature leads overall to a 4.23% increase in the equilibrium gas phase partial pressure (pCO2) of a sea water sample [Chipman et al., 1992]
The increase of temperature increases the pCO2 of seawater by about 16 microatm. Thus an increase of ~16 ppmv in the atmosphere is sufficient to restore the previous (dis)equilibrium. But as the biosphere increases its CO2 uptake at higher temperatures, the real near 2-million years change in dynamic equilibrium between temperature and CO2 levels is about 8 ppmv/ ̊C.