Wood Romances

The 2024 Global Carbon Budget has been out for a while now, but I thought it would be helpful to show the results of this update now along with the 2024 "year in review" type posts. The data included in the report goes from 1750 to 2023, since the report was published before the end of 2024. Below FFI stands for fossil fuels and industry and LUC stands for land use change. I'm not including uncertainties in my graphs below for the sake of keeping the graphs readable, but the uncertainties are discussed in the report linked at the bottom of this post. Carbon emissions continue to increase, though rates have flattened over the last decade or so. The bad news is that 2023 experienced record high emissions, so we haven't reversed the trend towards decreasing emissions yet. Here are graphs showing this from 1850 and 1958 (when the Keeling Curve begins. Human carbon emissions are mirrored by the land and ocean sinks plus atmospheric growth, such that on average, human emiss...

The December 2024 data from RSS was just made available, so I thought I'd put together some summary graphs for RSSv4 and UAHv6.1. The 2023-2024 warming spike was more pronounced in satellite data, which is intriguing. But RSS continues to show more warming than UAH.   Here are trends for the full dataset and the last 30 years: 1979 - 2024 Trends UAH: 0.153 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ) RSS: 0.230 ± 0.012°C/decade (2σ) 1995-2024 Trends UAH: 0.162 ± 0.025°C/decade (2σ) RSS: 0.249 ± 0.024°C/decade (2σ) These trends seem pretty disparate from each other (RSS shows ~50% more rapid warming), and my uncertainty calculation doesn't account for all the sources of error in these datasets. Most importantly (as I share here ), difficulties with satellites beginning around 1998 were resolved in different ways between RSS and UAH. The decisions made by each explain a good portion of the disagreement between them (they can be seen between 1998 and 2004 below), and that is not factored in to the abov...

Most of the GMST temperature data is in for 2024, and as most predicted, it was the warmest year on record, though perhaps by a larger margin than expected. El Niño conditions developed in 2023, and typically the following year becomes the warmest year on record. When large El Niños developed in 1997 and 2015, it was the following year that became record years, and this pattern continued again.  Above, here's how 2024 looks in several major datasets. I put the 2-sigma uncertainties for HadCRUT5 in dotted lines. This graph is set to the 1951-1980 mean (left scale), and this allows you to see that most of the variability between the datasets occurs in the late 19th century. The right scale is offset to show the warming above the 1850-1900 baseline for HadCRUT5 with the 1.5°C target as a dotted horizontal line. Below I set the same data to the 1850-1900 baseline and plotted centered 30-year means from HadCRUT5; this has the effect of better showing warming for each dataset above ...