More Bad News On Climate Change

The Obama Administration has now admitted that it has been unable to negotiate a meaningful international climate change agreement as was supposed to happen before the climate summit in Copenhagen next month. President Obama been able to get the United States Senate to pass limited, compromised climate legislation, either. Obama won’t even commit to attending the climate summit in Copenhagen, though he’ll be right next door in Oslo, to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize for peace deals that he hasn’t made yet.

As we hear this bad news on the political side of the climate issue, there’s new bad news from the scientific side as well. Scientists working with the Global Carbon Project have released their Carbon Budget for 2008, and it shows that carbon trends continue to worsen.

In spite of the global economic downturn, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued to increase, at the annual rate of 2 percent. In 2008, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a level 38 percent higher than was present before the Industrial Revolution.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide is rising, the ability of the Earth to absorb the gas is declining. The Global Carbon Project estimates that while natural carbon dioxide sinks on our planet’s surface were able to absorb 60 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted every year back in the 1950s, that annual absorption rate has now declined to just 55 percent.

A particularly important piece of information from the report has to deal with the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the “developed world” (rich countries like the USA) as opposed to the “developing world” (not very rich countries). American politicians have argued against doing anything about climate change with the claim that developing nations are responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions, and need to do something about their pollution problem before the USA acts.

The Global Carbon Project report for 2008 reveals that although the biggest increases in emissions are coming from developing countries, 25 percent of those emissions are due to outsourcing by developed countries, as developing countries are serving as homes for sweatshop factories, making cheap goods for corporations headquartered in developed countries, sold to people living in developed countries. It’s our economic greed that’s causing an increase in pollution in countries that aren’t powerful enough to say no to the dirty factories constructed by the developed world’s multinational corporations.