The Price of Things
Now let us look at the Carbon Emissions Material Flows. The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong in the first place is to rebuild it, if you can. Often physical rebuilding is the slowest and most expensive kind of change to make in a system. Some stock-and-flow structures are only plain unchangeable. To fix a system, you need to understand its flow structure. Physical structure is crucial in a system, but rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place. After the structure is built, the leverage is in understanding its limitations and bottlenecks, using it with maximum efficiency, and refraining from fluctuations or expansions that strain its capacity. That means refraining from pushing the system out of its extreme ranges that it uses to balance itself. The best way to understand a system is to observe it. We observe the system by the thousand studies of earth. If we were to consider CO2 Emissions as a leverage point, lets understand CO2 material stocks and flow in the system. Material Stocks in this case come from CO2 atmospheric concentration from slow cycle and fast cycle of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when people first started burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million to 387 parts per million in 1990, a 39 percent increase. This means that for every million molecules in the atmosphere, 387 of them are now carbon dioxide—the highest concentration in two million years. Carbon emissions flow contribute to the atmospheric CO2 concentration growth rate. Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ reached 417 parts per million in 2022, about 51% higher than pre-industrial levels, and the highest concentration in the last 800,000 years and in the last 2 million years. Equally unprecedented is the speed at which CO₂ has accumulated in the atmosphere during the Industrial Era at about 10 times faster than any time in the past 66 million years. To understand the entire system, we need to look at the CO2 emissions flow.
Global Carbon Budget for 2023.
The carbon budget as described here, refers to the budget of all emissions and removals of CO₂ which are the direct or indirect result of human activities. The biggest component of this human perturbation is the emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) which accounts for almost 90% of all CO₂ emissions and includes a small component from the production of cement. The rest of the emissions come from land use changes (e.g., deforestation). Lucky for us, of all CO₂ emitted to the atmosphere only about half remains in the atmosphere and leading to climate change, the other half is removed by the CO₂ sinks on land (vegetation uptake through photosynthesis) and oceans (thru diffusion). This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils, and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. This way, the impact on climate change is only half of what would be, had not been for the help of those natural CO₂ sinks. That is why is so important we monitor, understand, and predict the evolution of the CO₂ sinks so we know how fast climate change will occur and by how much.
Precaution: Not all the CO₂ fluxes are known equally well, and although the global totals are known best, attempts to understand the regional contributions for each flux remains uncertain. We do know quite well the fossil fuel emissions all the way to the national level. CO₂ fluxes from land use change are the most uncertain and the consortium of scientists is making every effort possible to improve it. There is also variability of these fluxes at the annual and decadal scales for which we understand some of their drivers but not all. However, the long-term trends are better known and are the most important trends for understanding and predicting climate change.
Actual 2023 Carbon Balance Results
Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.1% in 2023, increasing 411 million tonnes (Mt) to reach a new record high of 37.4 billion tonnes (Gt). This compares with an increase of 490 Mt in 2022 (1.3%). Emissions from coal accounted for more than 65% of the increase in 2023. The global shortfall in hydropower generation due to droughts drove up emissions by around 170 Mt. Without this effect, emissions from the global electricity sector would have fallen in 2023. In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The result was that forest, plants, and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon. There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream Ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor. The study found that while ocean carbon sinks were working fine, the problem was on land, where multiple factors affect the amount of CO₂ plants can absorb, including droughts, fires and man-made factors like logging. Land regions exposed to extreme heat in 2023 contributed a gross carbon loss of 1.73 gigatonnes a year, indicating that record warming in 2023 had a strong negative impact on the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to mitigate climate change,” the paper found. Yakutia, a Republic in Russia’s Siberia, is currently dealing some of its worst wildfires ever, with over 350,000 hectares on fire forcing the regional authorities to declare a state of emergency. And last year’s extreme fires in Canada put 2.1 gigatonnes of CO₂ back in the atmosphere in 2023. To put these numbers into context, the 2.1 gigatonnes added to the atmosphere by the Canadian wildfires is more CO₂ than is produced by any country in the world, other than the three biggest emitters of China (11.4 gigatonnes), US (5 gigatonnes) and Russia (2.8 gigatonnes). It is also about a third of all the carbon that is absorbed by all the threes on the planet each year. If the CO₂ emissions from the wildfires in the US, Russia and SE Asia that are currently burning are considered, then it appears a substantial proportion of the carbon dioxide that should be removed each year by trees is being returned to the atmosphere by burning trees. This is before other factors are included. For example, the Amazon forest, the “lungs of the world”, suffered from a severe drought last year that also impeded plants’ ability to fix CO₂ and also accounted for a large fall in the carbon sink effect in 2023, according to Philippe Ciais, a climatologist with Laboratory of Science, Climate and the Environment (LSCE) at the Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines University in France, that has raised similar concerns. The regions with the hot temperatures are losing the most carbon in 2010-22,” says Ciais. “Those losses were even higher in 2023, especially in the Tropics… Even if 2023 was a transition from a La Niña (good for carbon sinks) to a moderate El Niño, we see a sudden drop of the land carbon sink from extreme warming and Amazon mega-drought. The decline of the northern sink was masked by recent good conditions in the Tropics absorbing CO₂, but in the coming years if this decline continues, we may see a rapid acceleration of CO₂ and global warming which was unforeseen in future climate models projections,” Ciais adds. It seems that this budget in the graph above for 2023 was unrealistic for Land to Ocean Transfers and land made a positive gross addition to CO2 emissions rather than acted as a sink.
In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 +/- 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa [in Hawaii], 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958, while global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions only increased by 0.6 +/- 0.5%. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean [carbon] sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.
Conclusion:
We are trying to tweak a natural system that we don't understand how it works fully and is bigger than us. The only factor that made a dent in the CO2 emissions trajectory was COVID-19 which is outside of our control. What is actually worse than 2023 results are the projected Global CO2 emissions for 2024. Sept 2024 we have already reached 422.3 ppm of CO2 concentration which is already higher than the 418.51 ppm observation same time last year at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii (NOAA).
Collectively, we are increasing CO2 emissions (and the CO2 atmospheric concentration per particular) to a record amount irrespective of all actions taken so far by the advanced economies. China is a major contributor to this, but we must factor the advanced economies demand for Goods from China that is fueling this. We also need to factor the price of CO2 emissions that we collectively are not paying for when we collectively (as businesses or ultimately as consumers of products produced by these corporations for our own demands) buy goods from China that does not have this cost differentials that the advanced economies have when they use alternative energy sources.
