[Note: This is the fifty-fifth sample from my rough draft of
a far from finished new book, Wild,
Free, & Happy. The
Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all
rants and reviews. These samples are not
freestanding pieces. They will be easier
to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE
— if you happen to have some free time.
If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and
recording my book HERE.
CLIMATE
CRISIS
The focus of this book is human eco-history. Climate change has influenced our journey
since day one, when our tree-dwelling ancestors had to move onto the
savannah. Today’s crisis is climate
change on steroids. It’s doing things
that humans have never experienced before — countless huge, accelerating,
scary, uncontrollable changes that we don’t fully comprehend. Our beloved techno magic is incompetent to
cleverly swish the bad stuff away. Say
hello to a thrilling future of big surprises.
For many folks, the climate crisis is not chasing them down
the alley every day, snarling and viciously snapping at their asses. Now and then we hear stories and see some
pictures. News sources tend to quietly
step around the embarrassing subject.
Too much yucky news can make their audience uncomfortable and
unfaithful. We get some peeks at reality
now and then, but most of the story remains behind closed curtains.
For many, the crisis can seem like a wee dark cloud on the
distant horizon. Day to day life in the
cubicle farm, or the family room, is rarely affected. But, if you make an effort to listen, the
jungle drums are regularly talking about highly improbable flash floods,
hundred year storms, persistent droughts, unprecedented heat spells,
landslides, etc. These weird stories
from outer space can often seem impossible, unbelievable, and deniable.
The climate crisis is not a sudden asteroid-strike event,
like the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001. It’s a vastly bigger and stronger disturbance
that will eventually be affecting everyone, everything, everywhere, to a
breathtaking degree, and causing much irreversible damage. It’s the unintentional result of way too many
people, living way too hard, for way too long.
Hopium addicts jabber about “solving” the climate crisis, and
looking forward to a sustainable green future.
There is nothing that the magicians of technology cannot fix. Hope fiends have blind faith that “it’s not
too late.” Buy an electric car, put
solar panels on your roof, shop like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy a long and
fabulous life.
The dreamy perceptions of these hope fiends reflects a
deficit of understanding, in combination with the Tinker Bell Effect. In the Peter Pan story, Tinker Bell is the
fluttering fairy of magical thinking, “Just think a happy thought and you can
fly!” Albert
Bartlett was amused by the popular fantasy that if you called something
“sustainable” enough times, then <shazaam!> it was!
Megan Seibert
and William Rees did an excellent job of explaining why sustainable
alternative energy visions are neither sustainable nor possible. Their report describes why “the pat notion of
‘affordable clean energy’ views the world through a narrow keyhole that is
blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs.” Alice
Friedemann examined the alternative energy options, and described why none
of them were an effective or realistic solution.
In addition to the hopium addicts are the shameless bullshit
hucksters. They are supported by wealthy
interests that want to keep the planet-thrashing status quo on life support
ventilators for as long as humanly possible.
Their cash cows produce generous profits, but exist at the expense of
the family of life. Bullshit artists
have been highly successful at sowing the seeds of doubt. Climate change is a hoax promoted by devil
worshippers! We’re regularly splattered
with a firehose of deliberate misinformation.
The unfortunate reality is that 7.8 billion people cannot
simply think a happy thought and become ecologically harmless. Climate change is the stinky steaming 100 ton
turd in the swimming pool. It horrifies
us, because it rubbishes our fantasies of human supremacy, endless progress,
and the best is yet to come. It makes
our beloved “high standard of living” look like an insanely stupid
hallucination (which it is) — a reckless high speed joyride that leaves the
planet in ruins.
The climate crisis is an enormous fast-moving subject that is
generating a staggering amount of articles, reports, books, and videos. The future has yet to be written, but a
number of current trends have a clear trajectory — warming climate, melting
ice, thawing permafrost, rising seas, extreme weather events, etc. I’m not going to play the prophet game, but I
do feel obligated to point out some critical climate-oriented trends that
obviously appear to be on a treacherous path.
The information on the following pages is a very rough
sketch, like a cop’s bodycam video of a chaotic crime scene. It’s written at one moment in time, from one
perspective, and is far from complete.
My plan here is to present a sampler of core ideas, and toss in links to
interesting sources. Readers who want to
further explore the issue can follow the links, and feed their hungry
brains.
Albedo
When incoming sunbeams hit white regions of ice and snow,
some of the heat is reflected away from the planet, back into outer space. This ability to reflect is called
albedo. Fresh snow, which is very white,
reflects 80 to 90 percent of incoming heat.
So, it has an albedo of 0.8 to 0.9.
Ice that has been bare for a while accumulates soot and dust, which
makes it darker, less reflective. It has
an albedo of 0.4 to 0.7. Sea water and
dry land are darker, absorb more incoming heat, and then radiate it. Open water has an albedo of 0.1.
When albedo reflectivity is diminished, more heat can enter
the atmosphere and accumulate. Ice gets
thinner, breaks up, and retreats. Then,
more solar heat can hit more open water or bare ground. More of the thick ice that used to exist
year-round now melts away during the warmer months. The duration of ice-free summer periods is
lengthening. This pattern is called a
positive feedback loop — more warmth, more melting, more warmth, etc…. It’s the engine of runaway warming, the
arctic death spiral.
Arctic
Ice
In 1968, the Apollo-8 mission orbited the moon, and took the
first photo of the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon. In that photo, Earth was white around both
the north and south poles. Today, when
it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the view from outer space shows a white
Antarctic, and a blue Arctic. As it
melts, the ancient northern ice sheet is gradually becoming an open ocean. With a stampede of well-intended, highly-destructive
booboos, human cleverness and runaway warming are changing the planet, and the
future.
Peter
Wadhams has been studying Arctic ice for 50 years. He has a way-above-average understanding of
the danger we’re in. He’s been working
hard to alert us, but not many are getting the message. Arctic ice is extremely precious, because
it’s essential for maintaining vital climate balances. Its cool temperature, and highly reflective
whiteness, have enabled the existence of life as we know it.
Over the last 70,000 years, climate trends have typically
been a zigzag pattern of frequent erratic swings, hot-cold-hot-cold…. Today, we are living in the rear end of an
11,700 year era of unusually stabile warm temperatures — a weird deviation that
enabled the emergence of fairly reliable agriculture, and allowed 7.8 billion
people to survive at the same time (temporarily). The long-term trends imply that we’re long
overdue for a new ice age. Fat
chance! Instead, we’re speeding out of
control down the hot lane.
The planet is sliding down the path to a largely ice-free
Arctic. A few decades ago, the North Pole
as covered with ice 10 to 12 feet thick.
No more. “With the steady
disappearance of polar ice cover, we are losing a vast air conditioning system
that stabilized the climate for thousands of years.” We have been living in “the Goldilocks
climate” — not too hot, not too cold, just right! That pattern has been disrupted by rapidly
overloading the atmosphere with ancient carbon.
Wadhams lamented, “We are fast approaching the stage when
climate change will be playing the tune for us while we stand by and watch
helplessly, with our reductions in CO2 emissions having no
effect.” In 2016, he wrote a short and
easy to understand summary of his findings, with excellent illustrations. I strongly recommend checking it out [HERE]. YouTube also has many Wadhams videos.
Morgan
McFall-Johnsen described the rapid melting of Greenland’s ice in 2019. That year, in just five days, 55 billion tons
of melt water rushed out of Greenland’s ice sheet, “enough to cover the state
of Florida in almost 5 inches of water.”
In their most pessimistic scenario, scientists had predicted that this
level of melting would not be reached until 2070. We did it 50 years ahead of schedule! “The Arctic is warming almost twice as quickly
as the global average.” The times are changing. Trouble ahead.
Greenhouse
Gases
Under normal natural conditions, CO2 is precious. If there was no CO2, there would
be no plants or animals. During
photosynthesis, plants take in CO2 and emit oxygen. At the same time, animals breathe in oxygen
and exhale CO2. It’s a
harmonious circle dance, normally. But
the balance gets blasted when we extract millions of years of ancient carbon
from deep underground, burn it, and totally overload the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is also precious. It allows incoming solar heat to pass
through, and warm the planet below, which enables the survival of the family of
life. It also allows some heat to escape
back into outer space, but not as much as it lets in. So, the atmosphere acts like a comfortable
greenhouse. Wadhams noted that if Earth
had no atmosphere, it would be a lifeless frozen planet. The moon is a frigid place because it has no
atmosphere, and its average temperature is -4°F (-18°C). Earth’s lovely atmosphere enables an average
temperature of 59°F (15°C).
There are several compounds that help the greenhouse maintain
a happy climate. In normal times, the
greenhouse is wonderful magic act. In
crazy times, greenhouse gas overloads can disrupt the global party. The four main greenhouse gases are carbon
dioxide (CO2) methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O),
and water vapor (H2O). CO2
is responsible for maybe 55 percent of the current imbalance. In preindustrial times, CO2 levels
in the atmosphere were 280 ppm (parts per million). In 2021 they reached 420 ppm — estimated to
be the highest concentration in more than 3 million years (or 4 million, or 15
million).
Methane levels are also soaring, from preindustrial 700 ppb
(parts per billion) to around 2,000 ppb in 2019. Methane remains in the atmosphere for 7 to 10
years, during which its impact can be 100 to 200 times worse than CO2. Then, it breaks down into CO2,
which can remain in the atmosphere much longer.
When methane’s brief existence is calculated within a hundred year
timeframe, its impact is 23 times worse than the hundred year impact of CO2.
Nitrous oxide is a minor offender, found at about 300 ppb in
the atmosphere, where it can remain for 120 years. Its source is primarily synthetic nitrogen
fertilizers.
Water vapor can act like an insulating blanket. As the Arctic warms, its air can hold more
moisture, and a layer of water vapor (clouds) helps to retain warm air.
The bottom line here is that manmade carbon emissions have
been working hard to turn the delightful greenhouse into an overheated
hothouse. Too much heat is being
retained in the atmosphere, frigid regions are melting, and a slippery hideous crisis
has popped out of the womb screaming.
The good news here is that we are beginning to learn a very
important lesson. Mistakes can be
fabulous teachers. The bad news is that
we are learning this at a time when a growing number of experts believe that
the crisis is already past the point of no return, off the leash, sprinting
away, disregarding our frantic commands.
Far too late, the wizards have discovered that the unusually warm and
stable climate that we used to enjoy was possible because of a priceless
treasure of snow and ice, which is now riding off into the sunset.
Clouds
Fred
Pearce described how clouds also play a role in the greenhouse magic
act. When the sun is shining, bright
clouds can reflect away 30 to 60 percent of incoming solar heat. Over the seas, stratus and stratocumulus
clouds shade the ocean, so less heat is absorbed by the water. During the day, low clouds provide cooling
shade, but after sunset they become a heat retaining blanket.
Whether clouds make shade or trap heat “depends on how
reflective they are, how high they are, and whether it is day or night.” Until recently, experts believed that the
conflicting effects of clouds were about equal, so they balanced out. That belief is going extinct.
Satellite data from NASA indicates that since 2013, cloud
cover over the oceans has declined, at the same time that global average
temperatures have risen sharply. Other
studies indicate that in warmer years, there are fewer low-level clouds in the
tropics. This indicates that in a
warming climate, clouds are expected to get thinner, completely burn off, or
not form at all. This would lead to even
higher temperatures, and faster global warming — a positive feedback loop of
more heat, less clouds, more heat….
Pearce wrote, “Recent climate models project that a doubling
of atmospheric CO2 above pre-industrial levels could cause
temperatures to soar far above previous estimates.” In pre-industrial times, CO2
levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm.
Double that would be 560 ppm. In
2021 they reached 420 ppm. The higher
they go, the hotter it gets, the fewer the clouds….
Carbon
Emissions Skyrocket
As described in earlier chapters, our ancestors began acting
like odd animals long, long ago. Our
quirky path picked up momentum with fire making, the domestication of plants
and animals, and the emergence of civilization.
The turbo thrusters ignited with the arrival of the Industrial
Revolution, when we plunged headlong into the brave new world of fossil
energy. With this shift, more and more
carbon was emitted by human activity, and absorbed by the oceans, atmosphere,
and greenery.
The twentieth century was radically different from all
previous time. Foolishly raiding a
massive 500 million year treasure chest of highly potent energy enabled the
rapid development of countless planet-thrashing technologies. Unencumbered by foresight, dangerously clever
humans looted the ancient hydrocarbon cemeteries, hauled much of the buried
treasure into the daylight world, and burned it — to enjoy a brief,
fantastically ridiculous, explosion of childish decadence.
In 2000, environmental historian J. R. McNeill wrote an
eco-obituary for the twentieth century, Something
New Under the Sun. This book
revealed the nightmares that exploded during that century from hell. Later, as the years clicked past, McNeill
realized that his book did not say enough.
The years following World War II were so spectacularly insane that they
made the first 45 years of the century look somewhat wholesome.
So, in 2014, McNeill and Peter Engelke published The Great Acceleration,
which focused on the era after 1945, when the poop slammed hard into the
fan. This era was the freak show in
which I have spent my life’s journey, the freak show when the human population
more than tripled, the freak show that the living generation perceives to be
the normal way of life.
They wrote that in 1750, when the Industrial Revolution was
still in diapers, 3 million tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere
each year. By 1850, emissions soared to
50 million tons. It was 1,200 million
tons in 1950, 4,000 million in 1970, and 9,500 million by 2015. How smart was that?
Steven Koonin
noted that of the CO2 we emit today, between 30 and 55 percent will
still be in the atmosphere 100 years from now, and between 15 and 30 percent
will remain for 1,000 years. It does not
promptly dissipate, so ongoing emissions ratchet up the concentration in the
atmosphere. Reducing emissions only
slows the increase. The gearshift has no
reverse.
Each year, about 37 billion tons of CO2 are
emitted. At this rate, the concentration
in the atmosphere would increase by about 2 ppm in a year. Year after year, more is added. A portion of these emissions remain in the
atmosphere for centuries, so their concentration continuously grows. The current trajectory of greenhouse gas
emissions is on a path to double by 2075.
Billions continue living like its 1999. Ignorance is bliss. John Gowdy concluded,
“The effects of fossil fuel burning are irreversible on a time scale relevant
to humans.” We’ve started something we
cannot stop.
Terrestrial
Permafrost
Peter
Wadhams noted that permafrost is buried under dry land across the Arctic,
spread across an area of 7.3 million square miles (19 million km2),
something like the combined land area of Russia and Argentina. As Arctic temperatures soar, the permafrost
is rapidly thawing (it does not “melt”).
Soils in this permafrost contain lots of organic carbon, plant material
that lived in ages past, but froze before fully decomposing. Unlike offshore (sea bottom) permafrost,
terrestrial permafrost does not contain frozen methane. But when it thaws and decays, microbial life can
then create and emit CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide.
Susan
Natali, an Arctic ecologist, studies permafrost, climate change, and
greenhouse gases. In the Northern Hemisphere,
about 25 percent of the land area sits above permafrost, a layer of frozen
soil, rocks, water, and organic material.
Some of it has been frozen for up to 40,000 years. Permafrost contains about 1,500 billion tons
of carbon — twice as much as the carbon already in the atmosphere, and three
times as much as the carbon stored in the world’s forest biomass.
Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as they
are in the rest of the world, a trend likely to continue indefinitely. This warming is thawing the upper layers of permafrost. “Not all of the carbon that’s in permafrost
will be released. Our current
expectations is about 10 to 15 percent of that carbon will be released into the
atmosphere. That said, if all of the
carbon of permafrost was released, at that point, this is not going to be a habitable
planet for humans.”
Craig
Welch also commented on the daunting speed at which Arctic permafrost is
thawing. Until recently, scientists
expected the rate of thawing to be gradual.
Reality disagrees. When forest
soils thaw and soften, trees get wobbly as root systems destabilize. These “drunken trees” will eventually fall
down. When frozen slopes thaw, landslides
happen, exposing the bones of mammoths and other ancient critters.
Abrupt thaw increases the number of massive ground
slumps. These depressions collect melt
water and rain, creating new ponds and lakes.
Bubbles of methane and CO2 rise up out of the mud beneath the
water. As the climate warms, and Arctic
lakes grow in size and number, greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could
triple.
Ed
Struzik notes that permafrost consists of up to 80 percent frozen
water. When permafrost thaws, the land can
turn to mud. Craters up to the size of
football stadiums are forming in the tundra, as the land sinks. The Batagaika Crater in the Yana River Basin
of Siberia is 0.6 miles (1 km) long, and 109 yards (100 m) deep. These thaw slumps or landslides are
increasing. Stream flows are changing,
and seashores are collapsing. In the
Northwest Territories, when a rapidly thawing cliff bordering the shores of a
tundra lake collapsed, the 800,000 gallon lake drained in two hours. In the Mackenzie River Delta, up to 15,000 of
the 45,000 lakes are expected to dry up.
With warming, willows and shrubs are now displacing tundra
vegetation, which includes cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries, shrubs,
sedges, and lichen. This is affecting
wildlife. In 2006, there were 3,000
caribou on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, now there are half as many. They have less lichen to eat. Musk oxen in Canada and reindeer in Siberia
seem to be dying from ancient pathogens that are coming back to life.
The U.S. Geological
Survey wrote an excellent 68 page report on thermokarst. This is a fairly new landform in the Northern
Hemisphere that has come into existence since the 1980s. Thermokarst is created as permafrost thaws,
and the land surface changes in 23 different ways. Common characteristics include lakes,
sinkholes, pits, landslides, collapsed pingos, etc. (See Wikipedia’s thermokarst page for
breathtaking photos of massive permafrost melting.)
Louise
Farquharson and team studied thermokarst development in the Canadian High
Arctic. They studied land that had been
frozen for thousands of years. Until
recently, the buried permafrost had been in equilibrium with the climate. They were surprised to find that, thanks to
rising temperatures, permafrost thawing was reaching depths that were not
predicted for another 70 years. “Our
data show that very cold permafrost (<10°C) at high latitudes is highly
vulnerable to rapid near‐surface
permafrost degradation due to climate change.”
Dahr
Jamail is a nomadic journalist who writes powerful stories from the front
lines of the climate blitzkrieg. He
visited the Inupiat village of Utqiagvik, Alaska. The original village is collapsing into the
sea, because the solid permafrost it was built on thawed and turned to
pudding. The new village is also
destined to tumble into the sea. Polar
bears are gone.
A gravedigger said that in the past, solid permafrost was
close to the surface. It used to take
three days of chopping to dig a grave.
Now it takes five hours. “Roads,
railroads, oil and gas infrastructure, airports, seaports, all these things
were built across the Arctic on the assumption that the permafrost would stay
frozen.” Ooops!
Offshore
Permafrost
In addition to terrestrial permafrost, there is also offshore
permafrost, which lies beneath seabed sediments. It originally formed under dry land thousands
of years ago, when sea levels were much lower.
Offshore is what gives Peter
Wadhams screaming nightmares. It
contains substantial amounts of methane hydrates (also called methane
clathrates), and it is especially vulnerable to thawing as sea ice retreats,
and water temperatures rise.
Methane hydrates are frozen crystals of methane that will melt
and burn when close to a flame. They
look like ice. An estimated 10,400
gigatons of methane are stored in hydrate deposits. When hydrate crystals melt, the methane is
released. In the entire Arctic Ocean,
the hydrate deposits are estimated to contain 13 times the amount of carbon
currently present in the atmosphere.
Wadhams is especially focused on the East Siberian Arctic
Shelf. In the East Siberian Sea, this
shelf consists of 810,000 square miles (2.1 million km2) of shallow
water, of which 75 percent is less than 130 feet (40 m) deep. In the good old days, the entire sea used to
be covered year round with surface ice, which kept the water frigid or
frozen. This changed in 2005, when
summer sea ice began disappearing, exposing seawater to the atmosphere. Sunlight could now penetrate directly into
the water and warm it. Shallow waters
warm faster than deeper areas.
For the first time in tens of thousands of years, warmer
water could reach shallow regions of the seabed, causing permafrost to
thaw. As permafrost thawed, the frozen
methane hydrates began melting, releasing plumes of methane bubbles. In waters deeper than 330 feet (100 m), the
methane oxidizes while rising, and the plume disappears before reaching the
surface. In the shallows, bubble plumes
make it to the surface, and methane is released into the atmosphere.
In a 2016 article, Wadhams
described the possibility of a sudden catastrophic methane release from the
East Siberian Sea. Researchers “fear
that a pulse of up to 50 gigatons of methane — some 8 percent of the estimated
stock in the Arctic sediments — could be released within a very few years,
starting soon.” This would generate a
surge of warming. Russian scientists on
site calculate that the probability of this is at least 50 percent.
[To be continued. This chapter will contain 3 or 4 more segments.]
6 comments:
Mega Disasters: Global Glacier Meltdown (S2, E7) | Full Episode | History Channel
Just released on YouTube...keep in mind this was made before the current extreme heat that is melting glaciers even faster than depicted here. Also no mention here of the global forest fires that darken glaciers with ash & soot and warm them even more. As foreboding as this depiction is, it is even worse. But at least The History Channel is getting some hard truths out to the public with visuals they can understand.
Hi Thom! Yes, coverage is picking up. Much of it seems to conclude that it’s time for change — that it’s not impossible to fix it, and it can be fixed without sacrificing our beloved indulgences. Even if that was true (and it isn’t), changing the culture, lifestyles, and habits of billions of folks is… unlikely (ahem). Even if we totally shutdown civilization today, the CO2 would keep rising, temps would keep rising, ice would keep melting. That’s the message I’m getting after reading over 100 papers and articles, and five books.
I like the Tinkerbell thinking about it
.
The climate crisis is not a sudden asteroid-strike event, like the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001. It’s a vastly bigger and stronger disturbance that will eventually be affecting everyone, everything, everywhere, to a breathtaking degree, and causing much irreversible damage. It’s the unintentional result of way too many people, living way too hard, for way too long.
Hopium addicts jabber about “solving” the climate crisis, and looking forward to a sustainable green future. There is nothing that the magicians of technology cannot fix. Hope fiends have blind faith that “it’s not too late.” Buy an electric car, put solar panels on your roof, shop like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy a long and fabulous life.
The dreamy perceptions of these hope fiends reflects a deficit of understanding,
in combination with the Tinker Bell Effect.
In the Peter Pan story, Tinker Bell is the fluttering fairy of magical thinking,
“Just think a happy thought and you can fly!”
Albert Bartlett was amused by the popular fantasy that
if you called something “sustainable” enough times, then it was!
Megan Seibert and William Rees did an excellent job of explaining why sustainable alternative energy visions are neither sustainable nor possible. Their report describes why “the pat notion of ‘affordable clean energy’ views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs.” Alice Friedemann examined the alternative energy options, and described why none of them were an effective or realistic solution.
In addition to the hopium addicts are the shameless bullshit hucksters. They are supported by wealthy interests that want to keep the planet-thrashing status quo on life support ventilators for as long as humanly possible. Their cash cows produce generous profits, but exist at the expense of the family of life. Bullshit artists have been highly successful at sowing the seeds of doubt. Climate change is a hoax promoted by devil worshippers! We’re regularly splattered with a firehose of deliberate misinformation.
The unfortunate reality is that 7.8 billion people cannot simply think a happy thought and become ecologically harmless. Climate change is the stinky steaming 100 ton turd in the swimming pool. It horrifies us, because it rubbishes our fantasies of human supremacy, endless progress, and the best is yet to come. It makes our beloved “high standard of living” look like an insanely stupid hallucination (which it is) — a reckless high speed joyride that leaves the planet in ruins.
Just wondering about some numbers. 9.7 billion tons of CO2 per year is stated for 2015, but a couple paragraphs later, 37 billion tons per year is stated. Is that right?
I don't find 9.7 billion in this file.
Steve, my sources are below. Estimating something as vast as global CO2 emissions can only be estimations or wild guesses.
Then after 1945 humankind embarked upon a fiesta of fossil fuel combustion. Within fifteen years after the war ended, humans were putting around 2,500 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. In 1970 this figure increased to over 4,000 million tons, in 1990 to over 6,000, and in 2015 to some 9,500 million tons— about 3,200 times more than in the year 1750 and eight times the total in 1945. By the turn of the twenty-first century, fossil fuels had become responsible for around 85 percent of anthropogenic carbon added to the atmosphere.
McNeill, J. R.. The Great Acceleration (pp. 66-67). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grows by roughly half of the amount emitted each year. If the current concentration is 415 ppm, emitting 37 billion tons of CO2 (as we currently do each year) will increase that concentration by about 2 ppm. But the concentration is the result of cumulative emissions, and as we saw earlier, the CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere doesn’t go away when we stop emitting it. Emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans. Modest reductions in emissions will only delay, but not prevent, the rise in concentration.
Koonin, Steven E. Unsettled (p. 212). BenBella Books, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
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