I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to me like summer arrived early last year and stayed late. Spring and Fall seemed to come and go quickly. But will this year be different? Will this be a year that the heat subsides to more reasonable levels…with few tornadoes and hurricanes? Well,,, if you believe the world’s scientists, it’s not likely.
In a report released last month by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of academics, governments and industry that tracks greenhouse gas emissions, world carbon dioxide emissions rose an estimated 2.7% from 2017 to 2018. It’s the largest increase in CO2 emissions in 7 years after several years of little growth and puts the targets set at the 2015 Paris Climate Accord nearly out of reach. Further discouraging scientists, they estimate 37.1 tons of carbon dioxide will be spewed into the air globally in 2019, up from 36.2 tons in 2018.
Why are we seeing such increases in CO2? Well, for one, the Amazon rain forest decreased in size another 3100 square miles in 2018. And while renewable energy use is increasing rapidly, it cannot overcome the continual rise in oil and gas energy use. The U.S. is not the largest contributor, but it is part of the big 4; namely China, the U.S., India and Europe. And as you can see in the attached chart, though China and India showed the largest increases in carbon emissions, the U.S. was still up 2.5% when it was hoped that it would show a decrease in emissions. The increases were due to hot summers and cold winters for the U.S., while economic stimulus in China pushed an increase in coal-powered manufacturing.
So what does this mean for our weather in 2019? More trapped heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, we’re at CO2 levels not seen in the atmosphere since the Pliocene era some 3 million years ago and accelerating rapidly to levels never seen before. So expect another El Nino event this year which means drier and warmer weather in the tropics and a weakening of the amount of CO2 that the rain forests can suck up.
In other words…. another hot year with weather patterns we’re not used to.
#carbonemission #globalwarming #sustainability #oilandgas #rainforests #elnino #weather
