Visualisations based on NASA’s atmospheric models of greenhouse gas emissions and distribution clearly show that the climate crisis is a climate justice issue. CO₂ is primarily emitted by wealthy countries in the Northern Hemisphere and then spreads to the rest of the globe. It is countries that contribute least to rising CO₂ levels that suffer most from heatwaves, droughts and floods resulting from rising temperatures.
See also the Klimaatwiki (in Dutch) on the Carbon Balance and Carbon Sinks.
Fast-rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the main driver of human-caused global warming. Reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is the only realistic solution to the climate crisis. However, unlike some other forms of pollution, carbon dioxide is invisible to the human eye. This makes it harder to communicate the challenge of global warming to the public.
These visualisations by NASA – the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration – show CO2 emissions build up in the atmosphere over the course of a year.
The videos show emissions from a range of sources: human-caused burning of fossil fuels (yellow); human-caused burning biomass (red); land ecosystems (green) and the ocean (blue). The pulsing squares indicate the absorption of CO2 by land ecosystems and the ocean.
The visualisations highlight the imbalance in CO2 emissions between the northern and southern hemispheres. They also show how CO2 is carried around the world on air currents once in the atmosphere.
Sources and sinks
Carbon is constantly moving between the land, atmosphere and ocean in a process called the “global carbon cycle”. 1
Before the Industrial Revolution, the cycle was roughly balanced, 2 with similar amounts of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere and absorbed by the land and ocean. Around the 1850s, humans began burning fossil fuels at a significant scale, rapidly speeding up the movement of carbon into the atmosphere.
Currently, humans are releasing more than 38bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. 3 Around half of this gas is absorbed by the land and ocean, while the remaining half builds up in the atmosphere. Since humans first started burning fossil fuels in significant volumes in the mid-1800s, atmospheric CO2 levels have risen by 50%. 4
Source: CarbonBrief.
- https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/carbon-cycle.html[↩]
- https://www.metlink.org/resource/the-changing-carbon-cycle/[↩]
- https://globalcarbonbudget.org/fossil-fuel-co2-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2025/[↩]
- https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-atmospheric-co2-now-hitting-50-higher-than-pre-industrial-levels/[↩]