Carbon Cycle

How Much Carbon Do Humans Emit?

Nature absorbs 788 billion tonnes of carbon every year. Natural absorptions roughly balance natural emissions. Humans upset this balance. While some of our human-produced carbon dioxide emissions are being absorbed by the ocean and land plants, around half of our carbon dioxide emissions remain in the air.

Human produced carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing since the Industrial Revolution.

 

The arrows in the image above show the amount of carbon that is exchanged between the atmosphere and the other Earth spheres. The numbers are in billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide.