The record of recent Man-made CO2 emissions: 1965 -2013

Sooo, the developing nations are going to have better-growing plants of the vegetable variety, as well as growing “plants” aka “factories”?
Well, so long as they clean up the genuinely toxic emissions, more power to ’em. Literally.

Two points: 1) you don’t factor in the relocation of heavy energy intensive industry and manufacturing from the EU to China and other ‘developing’ countries – thus rendering the reduction of emissions in the EU completely meaningless (and economic growth, particularly in England, that relies heavily on financing growth in developing countries, lowers emissions per unit of GDP but this is also an illusion).
2) When will you commentators wake up to the ‘possibly irrational’ slur you cast on opponents of nuclear power. Get to think a little more rationally yourself….look at the the latest estimates for a SOLAR tsunami, and then ask you local nuclear operator how long the reactor would remain stable if there were no grid and no diesel supplies for a period of months or even years (check out the US National Academy of Science report and the Congressional hearings on these issues of lost grid and services). Then go back to the 1970s and 1980s when all those irrational but scientific and engineering critics of nuclear power (e.g. American Physical Society and Rasmussen report) pointed out the consequences of land contamination. Maybe these irrational Germans took a look at the way the wind was blowing at Fukushima and calculated the lost land had it been onshore!
There is nothing ‘irrational’ about deciding not to take these risks and to bear the consequences for electricity production. The Germans can get away with it at 20% of supply – but not the French, at 85%. And by the way….please note that the French system is a state monopoly, backed by jackbooted gendarmes who killed protestors in order to push through the programme. Is that ‘rational’?
I am beginning to think that ‘climate scepticism’ leads to as much wilful blindness as climate alarmism!

To mention Hong Kong as implicitly separate from China and developing but included in the emissions total is somewhat misleading. It takes a very large stretch of the imagination to describe HK as developing. It has an advanced post-industrial economy – post industrial that is apart from the government’s compulsive concrete pouring. The great majority of industry long ago migrated across the border. Any CO2 emissions come mostly from population growth and can in no way be compared to the increases in the mainland. The city is, in relative terms a mere gnat’s bite on the backside of China.

the economies of the developed world are that bad…………

ZA = Zuid Afrika dutch derivative of early settlers

Lucid presentation Mr Hoskins, appreciated.
Psst: … 18 years of nothing … maybe tail wag dog?

Jean Parisot says:
August 3, 2014 at 8:06 am

Reactor safety isn’t a science issue, it’s an engineering and economic issue.

I’d think security and political issues play large roles as well, along with our own ignorance of nature’s limits.
We have a few hundred years of detailed records about a body over 4 billion years old, and even where we do have recent, detailed accounts of nature’s fury – such as was the case at Fukushima – we go ahead and ignore them with the by-now-familiar litany of rationalizations, justifications, and – let’s face it folks – denial about what Mother Nature can dish out. That’s why a little study in Geology goes a long way.
Joe Public says:
August 3, 2014 at 8:28 am

This photo sums it up:

No it doesn’t; the photo is cropped to exclude China.

Peter Taylor says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:33 am
///////////
The substantial issue with nuclear waste is not from generation, but rather from military applications. Even if nuclear was not used for power generation, we would have almost the same problem of what to do with nuclear waste since the vast majority of nuclear is used not commercially but rather militarily.
Whilst disaster scenarios are something to consider, I personally would sooner see an expansion of nuclear over an expansion of wind. Of course, nuclear should be built in remote areas, and not in areas prone to earthquakes or tsunamis, but with that caveat, I envisage that we will be able to successfully contain any mishap such that the disaster scenario is an extremely remote risk.
Presently in the UK, the last 5 to 10 years have seen betweenn 25,000 to 40,000 premature winter deaths caused by harsh winter conditions, poor, old and damp housing and unaffordable energy prices. That is a lot of deaths and is a known and substantial risk inherent in the energy policy being pursued by the UK government. This number is likely to increase with the ever growing reliance being placed on wind with its vagrancies, particularly in cold winter conditions when a blocking high may be sitting over the UK and Northern Europe with the result that there is little wind and hence windfarms are generating all but no power in these conditions..
In all matters there is a balance to be struck. On the one hand known risks that we can see happening today, or remote theoretical risks that are unlikely ever to come to pass. I am not sure that I would be rushing for nuclear, at this stage, given that there is now shale, and it may well be more sensible, to first exploit the shale reserves for all they are worth, and continue research into nuclear with perhaps a long term goal of going fussion. There appears to be enough shale for at least 50 years of energy production (and probably more) and by that time, we are likely to see significant advances in other forms of energy production.

I heard that thorium reactors are the way to go if nuclear is the energy of the future. Anyone know about thorium as nuclear fuel? Pros and cons?

Here is an article about thorium reactors. http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21600656-thorium-element-named-after-norse-god-thunder-may-soon-contribute

Steve Oregon at 9:22am:
The alarmists have their daemon in CO2. One demon is enough and they seem to do pretty well with it. Why would you want to make water a problem?

The conclusion to draw here is that developed, wealthy economies are stable, not increasing emissions and not increasing populations rapidly.
Poorer nations are always looking to develop and have more children to ensure that some survive.
So preventing nations from becoming wealthy and developed leads to more problems and a larger increase in population. I don’t think there’s an overpopulation problem but it’s part of the globalists’ ethos, and the contradiction between the stated problem and their methods exposes their true motives for reducing population particularly in the third world. Nazi-esque reasons rather than environmental equilibrium reasons.

Hans Erren:
No, but I would ban nuclear power. Some idiot advocates here generation of nuclear power in the home.

Latitude says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:58 am
the economies of the developed world are that bad…………
###
That was my reaction also 🙁

mpainter, care to cite total deaths or mitigation dollars spent regarding nuclear power generation accidents as compared to anything else? your comments are not making much sense.

I think that you understand me very well.

Steve P says:
Gary Meyers says:
August 3, 2014 at 9:17 am
I heard that thorium reactors are the way to go…
I heard it was angel farts. According to a recent poll, 77% of Americans believe in angels, so we may be able to tap those heavenly emissions, real soon now.
But until then, it’s probably a good idea to continue pouring money down the Thorium pit, because you heard it was the way to go, but more importantly because, you know, we don’t have anything else.
Steve, I did not advocate thorium reactors, I merely brought it up as a point for discussion. Angel farts, really?

Steve P,
Here is one for you to chew on for a while. Why not build a huge geothermal network to tap all of the geothermal energy of Yellow Stone? This is just another point for discussion. I am not advocating anything but discussion.

Gary Meyers says:
August 3, 2014 at 9:17 am
“Anyone know about thorium as nuclear fuel?”
Wikipedia is actually good for some things, like looking this up. If we could speed up the timetable for Gen IV reactors in general, it would go a long way to making the planet cleaner, even if CO2 generation is not genuinely a concern.
mpainter says:
August 3, 2014 at 10:30 am
I sympathize with your concerns. While I think the Fukushima accident is actually heartening – it was a Gen II design, and it held up pretty well, considering the 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami – the thing that worries me most is nuclear waste which could be used in improvised dirty weapons, or more powerful weapons by rogue states which would be able to get access to the waste.
But, if the money being poured into solar and wind power, two sources which do not have the energy density to satisfy the world’s appetite on any practical level, were to be poured into Gen IV, these concerns could be substantially mitigated.

Gary Meyers:
Nuclear power will not mitigate concerns about safety but will instead exacerbate them.As far as your claim of a cleaner world, how clean is Chernobyl 26 years later?

Steve Oregon said
By everything I have read the atmospheric water column has not and is not cooperating.
From my layperson perspective that appears to be what should be an an iron clad end to the CO2 hysteria.
Increased CO2 is simply not doing what the team supposed it was doing. At all.
The CO2 hysteria should have ended many years ago, for many reasons. To the warmists, facts are nothing but irrelevant irritants that tend to get in their way.

Bart says:
August 3, 2014 at 11:31 am

I sympathize with your concerns. While I think the Fukushima accident is actually heartening – it was a Gen II design, and it held up pretty well, considering the 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami…

A triple melt-down equates to “…held up pretty well”? Nothing like ‘the ol’ college try’ when it comes to nuclear reactors, I guess.
The enthusiasm for Thorium reactors is not shared by all:

Thorium: Not ‘green’, not ‘viable’, and not likely
In this Briefing, we examine the validity of the optimistic claims made for thorium fuel, MSRs and the LFTR in particular. We find that the claims do not stand up to critical scrutiny, and that these technologies have significant drawbacks including:
[…]
3.4 Safety
Claim: LFTRs are intrinsically safe, because the reactor operates at low pressure and is and incapable of melting down.
Response: the design of molten salt reactors does indeed mitigate against reactor meltdown and explosion. However, in an LFTR the main danger has been shifted from the reactor to the on-site continuous fuel reprocessing operation – a high temperature process involving highly hazardous, explosive and intensely radioactive materials. A further serious hazard lies in the potential failure of the materials used for reactor and fuel containment in a highly corrosive chemical environment, under intense neutron and other radiation.

My bold
http://nuclearfreeplanet.org/thorium-not-green-not-viable-and-not-likely-oliver-tickell-june-2012-.html

This article should be rewritten taking in to account the out sourcing of heavy industry to developing countries that also have less stringent or non existent environmental controls.
There are serious pollution and health problems in many of these developing countries that are manufacturing goods and products for consumers in the developed world.
A far more informative and honest appraisal would be per capita/C02 emissions that take into account the total CO2 produced manufacturing and transporting goods and services to developed countries and their consumers. The picture would be very different.

Gary Meyers says:
August 3, 2014 at 12:51 pm
Yes, nothing lasts forever, but by many estimates, we’ve got reserves of coal and other fossil fuels in such great abundance that there is no danger of any shortage for perhaps hundreds of years.
Because the CAGW conjecture is bust, there is no reason to limit our CO2 emissions, demonize carbon, nor penalize coal. In any event, as the article shows, our misguided efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions will have little impact on overall totals because of growth elsewhere.

Here is the message for those who come to hawk their thorium and G this and that nuclear power reactors: we are skeptics and not so easily taken in by your slick touts.

So, you’re saying it would be really foolish and futile for the US to double our power costs in an effort to reduce global CO2 emissions?
Would someone please tell the President.

Could we have a chart showing what % of total CO2 emissions has occurred since which dates ie emissions since 1950 are x% of all CO2 emissions, since 1960 its y%, etc etc. Particularly interested in the figure for post 2000, which eyeballing the total missions chart must be a fairly high number, as thats the stat I want to throw at people I’m arguing with about AGW – a large % of all CO2 ever emitted is post 2000, and yet temperatures have cooled since then.

Bart says:
August 3, 2014 at 3:56 pm

The partial meltdowns which occurred were relatively minor,

Ah so. These are not the meltdowns we need to fear; they were only partial and relatively minor.
Not according to Japan’s Nuclear Emergency Response HQ, which stated in June 2011 that reactors 1, 2 and 3 experienced “a full meltdown.”

June 7, 2011 5:56 a.m. EDT
Tokyo (CNN) — Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.
The nuclear group’s new evaluation, released Monday, goes further than previous statements in describing the extent of the damage caused by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
The announcement will not change plans for how to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the agency said.
Reactors 1, 2 and 3 experienced a full meltdown, it said.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/06/06/japan.nuclear.meltdown/
But that’s not the end of it. Not only have the cores melted down, but even worse, they’ve melted through the containment vessels:

Nuclear fuel has melted through base of Fukushima plant
The nuclear fuel in three of the reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant has melted through the base of the pressure vessels and is pooling in the outer containment vessels, according to a report by the Japanese government.
The findings of the report, which has been given to the International Atomic Energy Agency, were revealed by the Yomiuri newspaper, which described a “melt-through” as being “far worse than a core meltdown” and “the worst possibility in a nuclear accident.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8565020/Nuclear-fuel-has-melted-through-base-of-Fukushima-plant.html
Finally, I must tell you that attacking the source is not a worthy enterprise. All issues must be judged on their own merits, irrespective of the source where they appear.

Is there a trend graph somewhere showing relative proportions of all major sources of CO2 including man made? If we contribute 3-4% then where does the remainder come from?

Bart@6:38pm says
You seem unconcerned to have been found presenting such twisted tales as facts.

mpainter says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Why do you have this irrational fear? Why do you think there is no difference between the generations? You’re like the first caveman warning others that fire is bad, and we should just avoid it no matter what precautions we take. “Hey, Og: talk to me when you have Gen XLVII fire.” It’s ridiculous.
It was a freaking 9.0 earthquake, guys. And, today’s stuff is better, and tomorrow’s will be even better. Get a grip.

nc says:
August 3, 2014 at 7:47 am
“Pamela well put. I have found it interesting that all this bs about man’s c02 emissisions always leaves out the ratio between anthropogenic and natural…..”
That ratio is quite well known, though it’s very inconvenient for the global warming cult.
Nature emits roughly 30 times more CO2 than mankind. So, if CO2 is a pollutant, Nature is by far the biggest polluter.
It does seem odd that CO2 has increased by around 50% after mankind increased total emissions by just 3%, particularly as the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is probably just a few years.
In the BBC Horizon program a few years ago (“Science Under Attack”) the NASA climate scientist told an outrageous lie. As the main part of his ‘proof’ of global warming, he stated that mankind emitted 7 times more CO2 than Nature. The sad thing is that the great majority of the audience wouldn’t know any better and would simply assume he was telling the truth.
How appropriate that his ‘proof’ should depend on an outrageous and completely provable lie.
And, yes, science is under attack. But the attack doesn’t come from the sceptics, who are fighting to regain the integrity of science. The attack comes from scientists who care more about their own vested interests and green fantasies.
Chris

I don’t think it is fair to say ‘that increase is accelerating’ looking at the first chart.

That’s a good point Chris. I rarely see Henry’s law mentioned when people discuss if the increase in CO2 is manmade or natural but I think it’s potentially important. Henry’s law governs the dissolution of gases in water and states that the concentration of a gas in water is proportional to its partial pressure adjacent to the solvent. At the average surface temperature of 15C Henry’s law implies that there must exist about 50 times more CO2 in the oceans than the atmosphere. This is often described as the 1:50 ‘partitioning ratio’. This implies that if you increase CO2 in the atmosphere – when equilibrium is reached – the oceans must absorb 98% of human CO2. I have seen arguments that because of dissociation constants it takes a while for this equilibrium to be established, but if that were true then brewery manufacturers would be out of business and soda siphons would not work. Open a bottle of coke and the CO2 in the water reaches a new equilibrium with the CO2 in the air within hours as the drink goes flat. By my understanding when CO2 dissolves in a bottle of coke it dissociates into HCO3 (bicarbonate ions) and CO32 (carbonate ions) as it does in the oceans also. I have yet to see a reasonable argument as to how human CO2 can accumulate in the atmosphere for centuries without obeying the fast-equilibrium of Henry’s law. The IPCC argue that the oceans cannot absorb CO2 because of the Revelle Factor, but the Revelle Factor seems wrong to me. For one thing it appears to be discriminating between natural and human CO2. The Revelle Factor implies that at the current DIC ratio the surface oceans can only absorb ~10% of anthropogenic CO2. But according to the IPCC’s figures in AR4 the oceans are annually re-absorbing 99% of all natural CO2 they outgas. So on one hand they can only absorb a small fraction of human CO2 due to this ‘chemical back-pressure’ from the Revelle Factor but on the other hand they are re-absorbing practically all of the natural CO2 that they are outgassing. Natural CO2 obeys the fast-equilibrium of Henry’s law but human CO2 appears not to. When the IPCC tested for the Revelle Factor they re-discovered Henry’s law but deleted the results from the final IPCC report as Jeff Glassman explains: “Neither Salby nor the IPCC refers to the solubility of CO2 in water, or to Henry’s Law. In trying to rehabilitate the Revelle Factor for AR4, an IPCC author showed that it was temperature dependent, and as can be seen, resembling Henry’s coefficient for CO2 in water. Expert reviewer Nicolas Gruber explained that this dependence was a “common misconception”. Thereupon the IPCC editor deleted the figure for the final report “in order not to confuse the reader”, supposedly with uncomfortable solubility effects”.

michael hammer says:
August 3, 2014 at 9:37 pm
“A natural system with all the vagaries remains balanced to 1 part in 10,000 or better.”
Spot on. I’ve been pounding that drum for some time. A model of a rock solid equilibrium, with simultaneous high sensitivity such that our puny emissions send it right off, is completely inconsistent with basic stability theory.

The problem with academic classification of countries like this is that developed and developing are not complimentary categories. They should use undeveloped and developed, or undeveloping/static/developing. Or better yet, three or more GDP per capita classes.
Another problem is countries never move out of the undeveloped category. Why is S Korea there? Taiwan had chip foundries in the 1990s. China recently caught up with them.

chipstero7 says:
August 4, 2014 at 7:46 am
I rarely see Henry’s law mentioned when people discuss if the increase in CO2 is manmade or natural but I think it’s potentially important.
It is important, but in a different way than you see it:
Henry’s Law is for pressure differences, not for quantities. It doesn’t matter if the amounts in the (deep) oceans are 50 times that in the atmosphere, it matters what the pressure difference is between CO2 in the atmosphere and CO2 in the ocean surface.
Take a Coke bottle of 0.5, 1 and 1.5 liter, shake them at the same temperature and if they are filled from the same batch, you will find hardly any difference in pressure under the screw cap.
Currently the pressure in the atmosphere, as area weighted average, is slightly higher than in the ocean surfaces. That means that in average more CO2 is entering the oceans than is released by the oceans:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/pubs/outstand/feel2331/exchange.shtml and following pages
Further, while the ocean surface is quite fast equilibrating with the atmosphere, the deep oceans exchanges are quite limited. The ocean surface can absorb only 10% of the change in the atmosphere, due to constraints in buffering (the Revelle/buffer factor), that is about 0.5 GtC/year of the 9 GtC emissions. That factor is in fact how much more CO2 can dissolve in seawater than in fresh water: in fresh water only 1% of the atmospheric change shows up, due to the low pH of the solution and no buffering.
No problem for the deep oceans, but the exchange rate is much slower and the change in pressure difference over time only shows some 3 GtC/year extra uptake by the deep oceans.
The difference between the huge seasonal exchanges (mainly from the ocean surface) and the uptake of extra CO2 is that the seasonal exchanges are temperature dependent, while the extra uptake is pressure dependent. Temperature increases drives CO2 out of the ocean surface at high speed, but up to maximum 17 ppmv/°C before reaching a new equilibrium (yes, Henry’s Law). Because the temperature change is only over half a year and vegetation acts in opposite way, the amplitude is about 5 ppm/°C, where the (NH extra-tropical) vegetation is dominant, not the oceans. But still the exchanges are huge. The difference after a full seasonal cycle is what matters for any removal, and that is mainly pressure (difference) dependent, less temperature dependent.
The remaining difference between human emissions and what is found as increase in the atmosphere is taken away by (land) plants (sea plants have plenty of CO2 available): some 1 GtC/year:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
That makes that about halve of the extra CO2 induced by humans is taken away (as mass, not as original molecules) by different other reservoirs. Not fast enough to remove all extra CO2 within short time, but fast enough to follow temperature over MWP-LIA or ice ages.
The estimate of the average e-decay rate of any extra CO2 in the atmosphere is over 50 years:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm or a half life time of ~40 years.
Much faster than the IPCC hundreds to thousands of years, as these are based on the Bern model, which implies a saturation of the deep oceans, for which currently is not the slightest indication.

Pam;
We need a letter- writing campaign to thank the Chinese for their contributions to near- and mid-term plant growth, notably in their own arid regions, and to encourage them to redouble their efforts. cc the newspapers and EPA.