CO2 Emissions are a Planetary Problem
I have noticed that the foolish and/or dishonest folks who remain interested or reimbursed to disseminate misleading information about anthropogenic global warming are repeating the story about the fall in US CO2 emissions. That misleading presentation is being framed as evidence that the burning of fossil fuels and emission of C02 is not a real problem, that global warming is not happening and caused by the activities of human beings.
Tell it to the folks who are suffering through the heatwave in the “red” states today. The issue is emission and concentration of CO2 levels on the global scale, friends. If you measure emissions in a National Park, things look really great. If you measure emissions in any small part of the planet, you can produce data that will make emission levels look great or terrible, but if you measure emissions on the planetary scale, the scale that is our climate, the scale that produces our weather, then we continue to face a catastrophic problem.
Here’s a piece from the Guardian:
World carbon dioxide levels highest for 650,000 years, says US report
Cooling towers at Eggborough power station, near Selby. Photograph: John Giles/PA
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.
Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.
Read the real numbers. Don’t be fooled by the folks who are engaged in dishonest presentation of limited data. Shame on those of you who do this with knowledge that the data is meaningless and misleading. For those of you who are confused by the data, learn to evaluate when data is being skewed or limited to produce a misleading result and recognize that folks who knowingly provide misleading data are not to be trusted.