Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo made 2024 a hard year to bear for anyone following them, and unfortunately it was all too easy to spend the year doomscrolling through the horrid video feeds that testified to humanity’s inhumanity.
The fate of the whole earth — of its trillions of life forms, including billions of humans — also took a turn for the worse. The World Meteorological Organization projected total global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2024 to be 41.6 billion tons. Some 37.4 billion of that was from humans burning petroleum, fossil gas, and coal. The rest was from deforestation. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and likely the hottest in 125,000 years, though some of its ferocity was from the lingering cyclical El Niño that has now subsided.
Speaking of deforestation, NOAA is reporting the disturbing news that “After storing carbon dioxide in frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is being transformed by frequent wildfires into an overall source of carbon to the atmosphere, which is already absorbing record levels of heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution.”
No, no, not that. The arctic tundra is starting to put out CO2? That is very disturbing news.
Here’s the bad news: In 2023, global carbon dioxide emissions came to 40.6 billion tons.
That means emissions increased in 2024. This is nine years after the Paris Conference, 27 years after the Kyoto protocol.
We know that carbon dioxide and methane cause global heating and that they are changing the climate in extremely dangerous ways. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by heat, aridification, and sea level rise. People will die. Whole animal species could be wiped out. Food shortages loom.
So there is no excuse for increasing our emissions, which for the most part means burning more coal, gas and oil. Why would you do that? Are you, like, insane?
Courtesy World Meteorological Organization
The UIAA reports on a study in The Cryosphere, “2024 data from 5,500 glaciers across the Andes show the mountains have lost 25% of their ice coverage since the Little Ice Age, and that their tropical glaciers are melting ten times faster than the cumulative global average.” The best case scenario is that they only lose another 25% of their mass over the next 75 years, but it could be as much as 50%. All that water will make its way into the seas and cause sea level rise.
All the hurricanes in 2024 were fiercer because of climate change, by 15-25 mph. That is, if a hurricane would have had 125 mph winds in the old days, it would have up to 150 mph winds today because the oceans are much hotter.
The US government is largely pro-carbon, continuing to subsidize petroleum and gas to the tune of billions. This, even though the United States is currently the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and by far the largest historically.
The US government is about to get even more pro-carbon. But the US government’s budget is $4 trillion a year, and the US GDP is $29 trillion, so the society far outweighs the government. We have to keep fighting against carbon. This is not an individual responsibility. We can only succeed by changing big structures — pressuring businesses and local and state communities. We can still make essential progress even with strong headwinds. And, every ton of carbon dioxide we don’t release into the atmosphere is a win for humanity over the next few centuries. And, look. Things are going to get hard. There will be severe challenges. But we can find ways to overcome them. If we act now.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved