Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamBorick | Hacker News Reader

I don't have access to this article so I'm not 100% sure, but at a guess they mean "many nations have made public claims that they plan to target reaching net-zero by around <some date>"

To my knowledge, carbon emissions are still increasing every year, and increasing in their rate of increase every year. I would love to be wrong.

This site doesn't include pandemic data: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

View on HN

Doesn't the plot on that page directly contradict that?

It was effectively flat from 2012-2017, then small upticks in 2018 and 2019?

The second derivative of CO2 seems to show a huge decrease in the last few years.

There were similar "flattenings" in the early 80's

If you had a plateau with twice the number of points (years) than any previous plateau then I would buy that something was going on.

But sadly - we don't.

I would also assume that there are still billions of people around the world aspiring to live lifestyles like people in the US/Western Europe, so absent the development of an energy source comparable to the convenience and low price of fossil fuels, any slack in demand from US/Western Europe will be picked up by the poorer billions.

I'm at least hopefully because this one appears longer (~9 years; if you count 2012-2019; most of the other drops were shorter and seem to be tied to major economic events - the 73 and 79 oil crises, fall of the Soviet Union in 91 and subsequent recession in Eastern Europe, and the great recession in 2009.

Seeing an apparent flattening in a period of major economic growth is really encouraging.

Atmospheric CO2 growth rate over time

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Year-by-year is alot of noise, but over decades we see mostly steady accelleration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com