“Since 1751 approximately 329 billion [metric] tons of carbon have been released to the atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels and cement production. Half of these emissions have occurred since the mid 1970s. The 2006 global fossil-fuel carbon emission estimate, 8230 million metric tons of carbon, represents an all-time high and a 3.2% increase from 2005.” CDIAC
This is the 1st in a series of posts on CO2 emissions, CO2’s fate in the atmosphere and the long term climate and ocean impacts of these emissions.
In this 1st post, I use CDIAC CO2 emission data to prepare a trend chart and CSV file showing annual global CO2 emissions for the period 1751-2006. The data and R script are available on-line as a Google spreadsheet and Google document so that interested readers can easily download CSV files of the data and generate analysis and charts on their own in Excel, R or any software that will accept a CSV file.
