Allow me to repost - US GHG Totals Rise To Record 7.12 BILLION Tons

[hatrack]

Not "million" as the Washington Post story I posted yesterday had it. Fucking Washington Post.

Greenhouse gas emissions by the US reached their highest annual total on record in 2004.

A report released by the US department of energy on Monday revealed that the emissions rose by 2% in 2004, from 6983 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2003, to 7122 million tonnes. This output is the highest annual total so far recorded by the US, says the UK’s premier science academy, the Royal Society.

The world needs to act with “even greater urgency and resolve” in order to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which cause climate change, urges Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society.

The aim of the Kyoto Protocol is to curb climate change by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of industrialised nations to an overall level 5% beneath those of 1990. But despite being the world's biggest generator of greenhouse gases – responsible for about one-quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions – the US refused to ratify the treaty, citing doubts about the science of climate change and the protocol's effect on economic growth in the US. The new US report reveals that US greenhouse gas emissions for 2004 were 16% higher than in 1990.

EDIT

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8495

[NNadir]

1. Some fun chem 1 calculations of the volume of this gas works out to...

around 4000 cubic kilometers of gas, treated as a a pure ideal gas at 298K with the molecular weight of CO2.

Note that 5% concentrations of this gas are often fatal.

That is not, by the way, how much has been released forever, but the amount released in one year by one country on earth.

Many of these gases are not, of course, CO2. Some are methane. Some are sulfur hexaflouride. Some are HFC's. Still some are CFC's.