The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has produced a number of entertaining animations demonstrating how human activity is raising the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The space agency has released a video that spans different sections of the Earth.
According to NASA, this visualization depicts the amount of carbon dioxide added to the Earth’s atmosphere in 2021, divided into four key contributors: fossil fuels in orange, burning biomass in red, land ecosystems in green, and the ocean in blue. The dots on the surface depict how atmospheric CO2 is absorbed by land ecosystems in green and the ocean in blue.
Greenhouse gases have kept the Earth’s temperature stable, allowing humans and millions of other species to exist there. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most dominant greenhouse gas on Earth, trapping and radiating heat. However, its excess is unquestionably hazardous to human survival.
The natural greenhouse effect of the Earth would be too feeble without carbon dioxide to keep the average global surface temperature above freezing. People are amplifying the natural greenhouse effect by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise.
Without land and ocean carbon sinks, which absorb around half of human emissions each year, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere would be significantly faster.
