Climate simulations of the effects of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions from the pre-industrial world to the present require a record of emissions that is continuous in both space and time. The Community Emissions Data System (CEDS)1 reconstructs monthly emissions on a half-degree grid from 1750 to 2014, across sectors from energy and industry to agriculture, shipping and land transportation2.

European accumulated carbon emissions from 1750

Future climate scenarios, from the present to the end of the century, are produced using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which consider various possible socioeconomic pathways of global development3. For CMIP64, the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, these pathways were gridded onto the same half-degree grid as CEDS, extending the record to 21005.

Carbon Chronicles animates this historic and future record on a globe whose surface rises with the emissions at each location, following the histories of industrialisation from Britain, across Europe and North America and then into East Asia and around the world.

Accumulated carbon emissions by sector including: Agriculture, Energy, Industry, Residential, Shipping, Solvents, Transportation and Waste

Notes

  1. CEDS, ‘A Community Earth-Atmosphere Data System (CEDS) for Historical Surface Fluxes’, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), 2020, https://www.pnnl.gov/projects/ceds. ↩
  2. Rachel M. Hoesly et al., ‘Historical (1750–2014) Anthropogenic Emissions of Reactive Gases and Aerosols from the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS)’, Geoscientific Model Development 11, no. 1 (2018): 369–408, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-369-2018. ↩
  3. Brian C. O’Neill et al., ‘The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6’, Geoscientific Model Development 9, no. 9 (2016): 3461–82, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3461-2016. ↩
  4. WCRP, ‘Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6 (CMIP6)’, WCRP – World Climate Research Programme, 2020, https://wcrp-cmip.org/cmip-phases/cmip6/. ↩
  5. Leyang Feng et al., ‘The Generation of Gridded Emissions Data for CMIP6’, Geoscientific Model Development 13, no. 2 (2020): 461–82, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-461-2020. ↩

Created in collaboration with Jonathan Mackenzie and Tom Corby.

Part of Planetary Assemblages.