Saving the trillionth tonne {of coal} (BBC)

VIEWPOINT
Myles Allen

On Thursday, 22 October 2009, a single tonne of anthracite coal was unveiled in the Science Museum in London as part of a new exhibition on climate change.

Not, you might think, anything particularly remarkable about that, except that this is not any old tonne of coal: it will be, as close as we can estimate it, the trillionth tonne of carbon to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide since industrialisation began in the 18th Century.

The Science Museum, London, and University of Oxford are committed to looking after it for as long as it takes, and solemnly escorting it down to a power station or wherever it can be used most efficiently when total carbon emissions from human activity reach one trillion tonnes.
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Over the past couple of decades, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have risen by an average of 1.6% per year, even allowing for the occasional blip like the collapse of the Soviet Union and this year's recession.
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If these trends continue, which is a relatively conservative "business-as-usual" scenario, we will release the trillionth tonne sometime in the 2040s - a date that is steadily advancing, as the underlying trend is for faster growth in recent years.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8334770.stm




The comments posted by readers would try the patience of a saint. US is well represented among the deniers.