Worrying video shows CO2 from US pouring into atmosphere

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A hypnotic new model from NASA visualizes how carbon dioxide flows around the world and into the atmosphere each day.

The visualization, released earlier this week, uses billions of data points from satellite and ground-based sources to track the movement of the greenhouse gas, showing clouds of carbon dioxide hovering and swirling over major industrial centers like the US and China.

“As policymakers and as scientists, we’re trying to account for where carbon comes from and how that impacts the planet,” climate scientist Lesley Ott at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a NASA article about the model, the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS).

“You see here how everything is interconnected by these different weather patterns.”

The patterns captured in GEOS are 128 times higher resolution than a typical weather model and 500 times more precise than a typical climate one, according to NASA.

In the video, C02 appears to pulse across the globe, as flows of the gas ebb and flow due to weather systems, the day and night cycle, photosynthesis, and local factors like forest fires or large industrial plants.

As captured in the model, the majority of emissions in China, the US, and South Asia are from power plants, industrial activity, and cars and trucks, while above Africa and South America, the emissions tend to come from fires and burning oil and coal.

Such precision modeling is more urgent than ever, as 2023 was the hottest year on record, according to NOAA.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has nearly doubled since 1750, the beginning of the industrial era, climbing to 427 parts per million in May 2024, according to NASA.