Natural Environment Blog

Chris over at Fly.co.uk recently informed me of an infographic on their website. The infographic shows some interesting statistics on world carbon dioxide emissions.

For example, according to the infographic, in 2009, China produced 6,200 million tonnes of CO2 compared to 5,800 for the United States. One only needs to look at the population of these two countries to see that something appears to be out of whack.

China has over 4 times the population of the US and yet, the US emits almost as much CO2 as China. Unfortunately, this gap is bound to widen as China becomes more and more prosperous.

As one would expect, the infographic has an airline/transport spin (no doubt due to the fact that its on a flight website), so there are some interesting statistics in that area.

A copy of the infographic is below. Due to its size, I’ve resized it to fit on this blog.

You can view the full-sized infographic here.

Did you know that in 2007, arctic summer sea ice reached its lowest extent on record?

Did you know that carbon dioxide levels are at their highest levels in 650,000 years?

And did you know that the global average sea level has risen 4 to 8 inches over the past century?

Well, if you’re into these kinds of statistics, you’ll probably be interested in NASA’s climate time machine. It’s an interactive tool that allows you to see how things have changed in recent years regarding the earth’s climate, sea levels, ice levels, and carbon dioxide emissions.