It’s hard to miss something that weighs 37 billion tons—especially when it’s all around us. Thirty-seven billion tons is the amount of fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere every year. We see the damage it does everywhere—from heat waves to floods to droughts to wildfires and more. But the CO2 itself? Entirely invisible. Until now.
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00:00 It's hard to miss something that weighs 37 billion tons.
00:05 That's the amount of fossil fuel related carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere
00:11 every year.
00:13 The gas is entirely invisible.
00:15 Until now.
00:18 In a striking new video, NASA has revealed the release and circulation of human produced
00:23 carbon dioxide for the entirety of the year 2021.
00:29 This agency's scientists drew their data partly from observations made by weather satellites
00:35 and partly by earth-based monitoring of known greenhouse gas emitters, industrial areas
00:41 in the developed world in particular.
00:44 The most dramatic takeaway from the video is the outsized role the northern hemisphere
00:49 plays in the global spread of greenhouse gases compared to the far less blameworthy south.
00:57 The video unspools over the course of the year and it's not until June that the south
01:02 is truly shrouded in the north's emissions.
01:07 It takes that long partly because the equator operates as an atmospheric berm with hot air
01:13 rising from the earth's midline, slowing north-south circulation.
01:18 Ultimately, however, those billions of tons of carbon dioxide blow past this natural stop
01:24 sign and cover the south as badly as the north.
01:29 For the first half of the year before they're obscured by CO2, Australia, Africa, and South
01:35 America appear to flicker on and off from green to a neutral gray.
01:41 That represents plant life absorbing carbon dioxide during the day and releasing it in
01:47 a sort of vegetable respiration at night.
01:53 If there's any good news in both the data and the video, it's that not all of the CO2
01:59 tonnage humans pour into the sky stays there.
02:02 About half of the emissions are taken up by the land and the oceans, which act as carbon
02:07 sinks, entraining greenhouse gas and preventing it from accelerating climate change even further.
02:15 The bad news is that there's at least another 37 billion tons coming this year and next
02:21 year and the year after that.
02:24 Until humans break their fossil fuel habit, the planet will continue to choke on the results.
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