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 emis...

The CO2 Coalition 's Fact #5 is titled, "CO2 emissions began accelerating in the mid-20th century." This one doesn't even get its title superficially correct. The explanation that goes with this is rather short, so I'll share it all. "Global man-made CO2 emissions began accelerating in the post-World War II economic boom and continue increasing today. If CO2 is the primary factor driving a warming planet, we should see indications of an acceleration of warming beginning in that period and continuing today." The graph associated with this "fact" is below. There are at least two obvious problems with this. First, you can detect acceleration in emissions by an upward curve - that indicates that emission rates are increasing. Clearly this curve is present in the late 19th century, then flattens early 20th century and increases again in the 1930s or so. But second, and more importantly, the CO2 Coalition  did not show any emissions from land use c...

The IPCC (and others) have observed that there has been a near linear increase in GMST with cumulative anthropogenic carbon emissions. "In the literature, units of °C per 1000 PgC (petagrams of carbon) are used, and the AR6 reports the TCRE likely range as 1.0°C to 2.3°C per 1000 PgC in the underlying report, with a best estimate of 1.65°C."[1] To be clear, 1000 PgC = 1000 GtC = 1 TtC.  I decided to see if that has been observed in the empirical data. I took values from the 2021 global carbon budget [2] and HadCRUT5 set to a 1850-1900 baseline and plotted the relationship. The R^2 was 0.88, and the slope of the best fit line was 1.847 ± 0.104°C/TtC (2σ). So the 95% likely range is between 1.74 to 1.95 C/TtC from 1850-2021. If I start after we reach 200 GtC in 1951, the best fit line is 2.153 ± 0.176°C/TtC (2σ) and the R^2 increases to 0.90, but I think it's best to be conservative here. What this suggests to me is that the IPCC may again be a bit conservative their best e...