CO2: Emissions & Changes in Atmospheric Levels

In previous posts, I have shown the 1750-2008 global CO2 emission trends and the atmospheric CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. In this post, I compare annual CO2 emissions with annual changes in atmospheric CO2.  The resulting chart shows the portion of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere and the portion that is soaked up by the land & ocean.  Links to the R script and source data files are provided.

CO2 and Temperature Trends

In a previous post I discussed problems with an Excel based CO2 and temperature trend chart that used 2 Y axes. Double axis charts can be misleading because they may distort the Y axis for one of the series.

In this post I show another example of am ineffective double Y axis CO2 and temperature trend chart and present 2 alternative ways to show the same data more effectively. Links to my  R scripts and Google spreadsheet based data file are included.

CO2 Emission Trends

“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.