Per capita CO2 is a valid measure of the impact of each person. It is not a valid measure of total CO2. They have different purposes.
It's a better measure of "relative badness not caused by the population size". For example it would make no sense to say China is bad, but if you break it into 4 regions they are not very bad. Per capita, you can't get nonsense like that.
Of course, the total impact needs to bring in the population size to get total emissions.
Just two different purposes.
ok.
But per capita is an assumption everyone shares blame which is not true. Not even close.
That's why I ignore the premise.
It's akin to claiming 3 billion chickens die every year in the US therefore all Americans eat 12 chickens a year.
Yes, the way I view it is that the change in population is dominated by other factors. GDP per capita growth is much higher. Agricultural productivity growth is higher. Electricity usage growth per person is much higher. Carbon emissions per capita have also fallen much more rapidly than population has grown in countries such as the US, so the carbon efficiency has dominated the growth in population to leave a large reduction in total carbon emissions.
All these these can play out globally. Carbon emissions per capita may head towards zero more rapidly than population grows soon. This is all you need for a clear fall (after a period when it has often not been clear if there is a rise or a fall, because of the nearness to zero change).
I didn't quite get that.
Population increase often does the dominating as opposed to being dominated.
Yes electricity consumption per person has increased considerably -
but I don't get the part about carbon emissions per person have 'also' fallen.
I would think that that has increased not fallen.
Upon asking on the internet I got a 13% increase in CO2 emissions per capita worldwide.
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Note that you won't get that percentage if you look at the increase in ppm per capita.
But total ppm increase per year is apparently 50% more than it was in 1988.
I am not talking about comparisons with nearly 40 years ago, but in changes in the recent past.
While per capita emissions have fallen a lot in developed nations with growing GDP per capita this century, even globally, emissions per capita have fallen slightly since the peak in 2012. 4.7 tonnes per capita versus 4.9 according to Our World In Data. So technically, it is the population growth (12% in that period) which has dominated the per capita fall, to lead to a rise in total emissions.
But to dominate the population rise now we only need a per capita fall of 1% per year. Way more has been achieved in many developed nations over recent decades.
Why was it so hot in the middle ages then? We are actually exiting a small ice age (Defined as a time where the earth has more glaciers than usual)
So that's why glaciers are melting, and the earth is slowly heating up, the earth goes in cycles, and it is entering a hot cycle, then will go back to a cold cycle, it happens, ok?
No the earth is heating, because of man made carbon pollution. That is an indisputable fact.
what percentage of the air is carbon? and btw, I now make my previous statment "undisputable fact" so you aren't allowed to disagree anymore, sorry.
Care to explain why these cycles occur? And why the Earth’s climate has been relatively stable for quite some time before undergoing a sudden change in a few hundred? And why this aligns with the timing of the industrial revolution?
Why was it so hot in the middle ages then? We are actually exiting a small ice age (Defined as a time where the earth has more glaciers than usual)
Firstly, regarding this nonsense about exiting a small ice age, that is effectively over. Global temperatures have been near flat for 8000 years and fell a little between the 9th and the 19th centuries. Since then global warming has utterly dominated that with a rise that is almost 100 times faster.
How difficult is it to understand the established fact that the Medieval Warm Period was a real but local phenomenon, and that global temperatures are not observed to have risen much in this period?
Even simpler than that is the observed fact that temperatures are now rising extremely fast by the standards of the record, with temperatures spiking well above all those for about 125,000 years, and will rise far higher this century without radical changes.
There are many factors like solar cycles, volcanic activity ocean currents, and more. We are exiting an ice age, and if we do all this, why were the middle ages hotter than it is right now?
Why was it so hot in the middle ages then? We are actually exiting a small ice age (Defined as a time where the earth has more glaciers than usual)
How difficult is it to understand the established fact that the Medieval Warm Period was a real but local phenomenon, and that global temperatures are not observed to have risen much in this period?
Even simpler than that is the observed fact that temperatures are now rising extremely fast by the standards of the record, with temperatures spiking well above all those for about 125,000 years, and will rise far higher this century without radical changes.
what is your source for the graph?
what percentage of the air is carbon? and btw, I now make my previous statment "undisputable fact" so you aren't allowed to disagree anymore, sorry.
It seems a bit funny that you don’t seem to understand you don’t need a lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to cause catastrophic damage. The sulphur and carbon dioxide aren’t doing a lot of damage. The fact that they trap heat is. You don’t need the percentage to be ten percent to cause major changes. Extreme weather is doing a lot already.
And by the way, chlorine can kill people with ‘only’ a thousand PPM.
what percentage of the air is carbon? and btw, I now make my previous statment "undisputable fact" so you aren't allowed to disagree anymore, sorry.
It seems a bit funny that you don’t seem to understand you don’t need a lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to cause catastrophic damage. The sulphur and carbon dioxide aren’t doing a lot of damage. The fact that they trap heat is. You don’t need the percentage to be ten percent to cause major changes. Extreme weather is doing a lot already.
And by the way, chlorine can kill people with ‘only’ a thousand PPM.
it is 0.04% how does 0.04% of the air trap significant heat?
what percentage of the air is carbon? and btw, I now make my previous statment "undisputable fact" so you aren't allowed to disagree anymore, sorry.
It seems a bit funny that you don’t seem to understand you don’t need a lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to cause catastrophic damage. The sulphur and carbon dioxide aren’t doing a lot of damage. The fact that they trap heat is. You don’t need the percentage to be ten percent to cause major changes. Extreme weather is doing a lot already.
And by the way, chlorine can kill people with ‘only’ a thousand PPM.
it is 0.04% how does 0.04% of the air trap significant heat?
And 20 years ago it was also about 0.04%
Note that the graph only goes up to 2019. The rise is now so fast the spike has been significantly increased in a mere 5 years, with 2024 being 0.23 degrees higher than the previous record (after 2023 had also been a record year).
ok thanks.
but if the heat has been increasing and the carbon has been barely increasing, is that really the problem?
Uh