Most CO2 emissions were in the last 30 years

In the 80's the global population was roughly 4B and half of these (2B) were in extreme poverty.

Today we have almost double the global population and less than 1B in extreme poverty.

Given that the biggest chunk of the emissions in the last 30 years came from nonOECD countries I don't see what the alternative was.

Force the poor countries to starve to death and not use cheap fossils to feed their people?

Always blows my mind to realize that CO2 makes up just 0.04% of the atmosphere. Just a surprisingly super-powered molecule.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...

The data is already 4 years old.

Not sure how many people realize the slow pace of these reports. That some of the most doom-scenario data, by the time it makes it into a report and hits a big headline, is already 5 or 10 years old.

Cumulative CO2 Emissions by world region, 1751-2017. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-.... [Accessed 24 April 2020]

Projected emissions for 2018-19 based on Global Carbon Budget 2019, by Pierre Friedlingstein, et al. (2019), Earth System Science Data, 11, 1783-1838, 2019, DOI: 10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019.

Graph goes from zero to 24 to 26. No thanks.

Hum... Surely the immense mass of burned oil does much BUT in the past humans heat their homes en mass with wood and coal, I doubt these emissions count such little amount.

Aside if you tell me that burning oil is far more polluting than burning wood that's another story, but in formal CO₂ terms...

Wow. I did not expect that. Especially during WWII a LOT of oil must have been burned. I always thought that would have been the peak.

I wonder how much it's gone up in just the last 10 years

I wouldn't have expected otherwise.

This study says human activity contributed just 12% of global CO2. I guess both can be true though.

https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Fulltext/2022/02000/...

Why the downvotes? Is there a flaw in this study?

Which doesn't matter at all because once CO2 is released, getting it back out is utterly beyond human capabilities. Not 1y out, not 10y out, 100+ years out, maybe impossible.

So we won't be doing that.

Which seems to mean, climate engineering, here we come ... But it's not so easy.

Cooling the planet is easy. Heating it is the hard thing. In an emergency, we could undo 130+ years of global warming in a few hours, with nukes, without advance warning. And given a few months to a few years we could use much more subtle methods too.

Of course, cooling would make REALLY large pieces of land unliveable. And ... in warm climates you have energy available. You can fight the effects of warming locally, even in a single house, which humans have been doing since before history began. Fighting cooling ... only possible if you bring your own energy. Cooling is much worse than warming.

So in the long term the evolution of thought is even more funny. We COULD cool the planet. We'll doubtless figure out a few ways to do it. We have already figured out one or two ways, though they could be more subtle. Maybe even one or two really good ways. Then, we'll research the implications better, and find that given the choice between cooling and warming ...

We'll take the warming over the cooling, given the choice. Even just cooling back to the levels of the beginning of the 20th century would be far worse than 2 or even 5 degree warming. And the limit of what the climate anomaly, also called global warming, probably isn't even 5 degrees warmer than 1850. What burning all fossil fuels (including coal) could induce is not quite 5 degrees. Unthinkable (but historically occurred) levels of volcanic activity can get us close to 8 degrees warming, but humans can't.

If you look it up, by the way, you'll find that solar power, no matter which method is used, is MUCH better at cooling the planet than forests, oceans, steppes, deserts, ... just about any place where you might build solar power.

So we could see the ultimate joke. We may cool the planet WAY too much by accident ... then find we're forced to find ways to artificially heat the planet again!

The problem with the current viewpoint is it's very basis. The view that nature is good for humans, is good for itself. Of course, this is bullshit. Nature doesn't care. Ironically, Gaia is often associated with the view that nature will provide. What did the mythical godess Gaia actually do? She fought to protect her children, the titans, who killed entire countries with their entire population and left desolate, lifeless places behind, against Zeus. Funny, that.

Nature doesn't care and will kill us all. The question is when, but that it will is a complete certainty.

The bumper harvests due to crops growing in a greenhouse like environment will be thanks to the foresight of past leaders.

This observation goes to the heart of why nobody is really listening to the climate change crowd. Most of the emissions were in the last 30 years and due to catapulting China out of poverty (and work in progress catapaulting India) [0]. There is a similarly frustrating dynamic to the anti-nuclear-power debate (which we have to pin our hopes on China also barrelling through). People get all riled up about the costs of something that is making the world so much better that the cost should be paid.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions