The climate summit in Durban is coming up and so expect a steady stream of shocking, frightful climate reports to come out over the weeks ahead. The latest comes from the US Department of Energy, which shows that global man-made CO2 emissions have reached shocking record levels.
Last year more than 9100 million tons of CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere. The reaction by the media in Germany today has been one of utter horror.
Global temps fall as CO2 rises to "record levels".
I guess the doom and fright that activists feel is understandable: global temperatures today are a whole tenth of a degree Celsius above normal and haven’t risen in about 15 years (in fact they are dropping), the third world countries are developing and living better, and the global economy has rebounded…oh horrors!
The German online CO2 Handel presents a news release from the German Press Agency DPA:
Just weeks before the UN climate conference in Durban South Africa, the US Department of Energy spooks the world with grim news: New preliminary results show that the emissions of the climate-killing gas Co2 is rising dramatically.
Alone in China and India CO2 emissions emissions climbed 10 percent.”
German Green Party Chairwoman Claudia Roth called the latest figures “alarming at an extreme scale.” Eberhard Brandes, Chairman of WWF Germany, is outraged and said: “The data coming out of the USA are shocking and exceed the worst our fears and pessimistic scenarios.” While Halloween takes place one day a year in the USA, in Germany it’s a year-round affair.
In comic fashion, the German Press Agency DPA blasted and blamed the USA, but then added:
The international community of nations has failed miserably.” In the USA CO2 emissions compared to last year decreased – in Germany on the other hand they increased.”
Decreased? Who cares – let’s blame the capitalists any way.
I’m sure German emissions will increase, now that many new coal fired power stations are being built to make up for the non CO2 emitting nuclear plants shut down as a panic reaction to Fukushima…
The law of unintended consequences?
I would think new capacity will largely be lots of new gas fired stations, a lot of them small sized cogeneration plants, providing electricity plus heating for, say, an office block, feeding surplus into the grid. You can bring them online quickly and without having to fear activists. These micro power plants come in all sizes, down to single family household size. There’s a subsidy or tax rebate (don’t know which) for them under the term “Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung” (engl. cogeneration).
CO2 be damned… What the German media of course fail to mention is the troposheric temperature dropping like a stone. Look at channel 06, 7.5km, and switch on all the last years:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Looks like a global Gore effect for Durban.
There must be something wrong with the numbers, or there is something I have missed or misunderstood.
We are about 7 ooo ooo ooo people in this planet. Each of us emit about 1 ton of CO2 per year by just breathing (do a search on google). That makes 7 000 million tonnes of CO2 from breathing. If humans emitted 9 100 million tons of CO2 last year, that means that in addition to breathing we emitted 2 100 million tons of CO2. What is that in the big picture? Or what is wrong?
They have dropped any pretense of presenting a coherent dialectic. The old mantra “more CO2 => higher temperatures = thermogeddon” has been truncated to “more CO2 = press the alarm bell” (in some cases they seem to have reached the highest level: “who cares about anything happening anyway? Alarm bells!”). Either they feel sure enough that the cry “CO2!” is by now ingrained enough to bypass any critical facilities in their audience, or they realize that the AGW narrative has completely fallen apart and can no longer be bothered to roll out the handwaving.
Or both.
Even more telling is what they cannot be bothered to mention:
Subsidies exploding without ever saving one watt of “non-sustainable” electricity?
Carbon exchanges closing down?
Cap-and-trade is dead?
Ecological AND economic devastation brought on by biofuels?
Billions of €€/$$/££ sunk into fraudulent enterprises like Solyndra or Spanish PV farms running by night?
Carbon storage is dead in the water?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/04/ceo-the-market-for-carbon-capture-and-storage-is-dead/#more-50579
[note that the list concerns only proposed solutions to “the problem”; you wouldn’t want to mention “Climategate” or “MWP” or “that Svensmark theory”…]
People with limited food and energy resources spend much time and effort obtaining their next meal and the fuel to cook (which almost always produces the dreaded CO2). Wealthy developed societies with well developed energy supplies and agricultural diversity and surpluses can (and do) direct effort and funds to environmental issues. Instead of being outraged by a growing global economy, a better response would be to hurry it along. A side-effect is the demographic transition that lowers birth rates and thus future population.
Og, about those Third World AGW reparations
http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/oh-about-those-third-world-agw-repararations/
OK, wait a minute, warmistas…
I’d like to know a couple of pieces of data, if they are available. I think they could do much to blunt the media’s obsession with “9100 million tonnes” (the horror of it!!!). It might at least give some perspective. My recollection is that human activity produces only a small fraction of atmospheric CO2. So:
How does the 9100 million tons of CO2 emitted last year compare to the total tonnage:
1. emitted by a) the biosphere, b) degassing of the oceans, and c) volcanos? A breakdown here would be nice, if available.
2. presently in the entire atmosphere?
I seem to recall that CO2 emitted by human activity only represents about 3% of total CO2 in the atmosphere, and calculating the tonnages presented in the IPCC AR4 report gave about 2.9%. So, where does the latest figure come in?
Many thanks, all, and thank you, Pierre, for your great blog!
BobW
“Its worse than we thought guys” The CO2 emissions in US are going up but US NATIONAL ANNUAL TEMPERATURES since 1998 have been going down according to NCDC data at -0.98 degrees F per decade. Just like we did not predict?
I think one of the reasons why CO2 emissions are up is the coolingof the planet especially the winters . Since global warmig is not happening as predicted fossil fuels often have to keep us warm.The northern Hemisphere winters have now been cooling more seriously last 3-4 years but North America’s winters have been cooling for a decade now. For example the Contiguous US THE WINTER TEMPERATURES [per NOAA] have been cooling at the following rates per decade . Every region shows cooling to some degree with the northern states having the greatst cooling. [Cooling patterns are apparent in Canada also]
EAST NORTH CENTRAL -8.7 F/decade
WEST NORTH CENTRAL -8.1
CENTRAL -5.8
SOUTH -3.0
SOUTH EAST -3.0
NORTH WEST -2.2
SOUTH WEST -2.2
NORTHEAST -2.1
WEST -1.3
NATIONAL [ per NCDC data] – 2.9 F/decade
These are 2001/02 throughto 2010/11 winters