KEELING CURVE ~ Carbon dioxide has increased worldwide from 315 ppm in 1958 to over 420 ppm in just 64 years
The Keeling Curve is a graph that represents the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere since 1958. The Keeling Curve is named after its creator, Dr. Charles David Keeling (1928 to 2005).
Keeling began studying atmospheric carbon dioxide in 1956 by taking air samples and measuring the amount of CO2 they contained. Over time he noticed a pattern. The air samples taken at night contained a higher concentration of CO2 compared to samples taken during the day.
He drew on his understanding of photosynthesis and plant respiration to explain this observation: Plants take in CO2 during the day to photosynthesize—or make food for themselves—but at night, they release CO2. By studying his measurements over the course of a few years, Keeling also noticed a larger seasonal pattern. He discovered CO2 levels are highest in the spring, when decomposing plant matter releases CO2 into the air, and are lowest in autumn when plants stop taking in CO2 for photosynthesis.
Keeling was able to establish a permanent residence at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, United States, to continue his research. At Mauna Loa, he discovered global atmospheric CO2 levels were rising nearly every year.
By analyzing the CO2 in his samples, Keeling was able to attribute this rise to the use of fossil fuels. Since its creation, the Keeling Curve has served as a visual representation of Keeling’s data, which scientists have continued to collect since his death in 2005.
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The Keeling Curve Hits 420 PPM, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, May 31, 2022
Levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide eclipsed 420 parts per million for the first time in human history in 2021. Scripps Institution of Oceanography updated this animation, which explains the rise of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the past 300 years and the measurement our researchers collect at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, known as the Keeling Curve. When Scripps Oceanography scientist Charles David Keeling first began taking measurements in 1958, CO2 levels were at 315 parts per million.
Check out more details at Scripps Oceanography:
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/2022/05/31/2114
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“K” is for Kilowatt, Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Magazine, November 23, 2022
If you add up all the energy America uses in a year — to produce electricity and also to perform the many tasks that have yet to be electrified, like driving and flying and making concrete — and you divide that by the total number of Americans, the result is per-capita consumption.
The figure comes to about eighty thousand kilowatt hours. Toss in the energy used to manufacture the goods imported into the U.S., and the number rises to almost a hundred thousand kilowatt hours. To put this in terms of power, Americans are consuming roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings draped around our homes, burning 24/7.
Owing to this every-day-is-Christmas level of consumption, annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person. Americans don’t have the world’s highest per-capita emissions — that dubious honor goes to Kuwaitis and Qataris —but we’re up there. Per-capita consumption in Thailand and Argentina runs to around two and a half thousand watts and emissions to around four tons. Ugandans and Ethiopians use a hundred watts and emit a tenth of a ton. Somalis consume a mere thirty watts and emit just ninety pounds.
This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentineans, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.
These figures rarely feature in conversations about climate change in the U.S.; they were hardly mentioned, for instance, in the debate over the Inflation Reduction Act. But to the world’s low-consuming countries the inequities are impossible to ignore. They represent yet another way the Global North has exploited the Global South; call it atmospheric imperialism.
“These disparities chart the rise of developed countries at the expense of others,” Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based think tank, has written. “The history of climate change is one of compounding injustices.”