According to the Global Monitoring Laboratory Mauna Loa (attached spreadsheet) run by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, (GML), the average global atmospheric CO2 concentration for 2020 was 414.24 ppm.  For 2019 it was 411.66 ppm. 

This is a one-year annual net CO2 increase of 2.58 ppm for 2020.

This 2.58 ppm increase was the same for 2021. 

NOAA proclaimed this 2.58 ppm increase “amounts tied for 5th-highest annual increase in NOAA’s 63-year record.”

Let’s consider what that claim really means. 

This 2.58 ppm increase is the net increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to the combined sum of all CO2 sources, natural and human, minus the combined sum of all CO2 sinks, natural and human.  2.58 ppm is the residual difference after subtracting all CO2 absorptions for 2020, natural and human, from all CO2 emissions for 2020, natural and human.

This means the average net increase in CO2 due to all human sources (e.g. fossil fuels, cement production, land use, etc.) could not have exceeded 2.58 ppm for year 2020.  

Dividing 2.58 ppm by 414.24 ppm equals 0.006228 or 0.6%.  Thus 0.6% is the maximum possible net human contribution as a percent of the total net global CO2 concentration. That is, on average for 2020, net human CO2 did not exceed 0.6% of net global CO2 concentration. 

2.58 ppm is 2.58 divided by 1,000,000, which is 0.00000258, or 0.000258%.  In other words, the net human contribution to the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration for 2020, and again in 2021, according to measurements (not computer models, not estimates) by the NOAA-Scripps Global Monitoring Laboratory, did not exceed 0.00025% of air.

Nevertheless, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the governments of the United States, Europe, and hundreds of other governments, global banks, many global corporations, non-governmental organizations and their lobbyists and activists around the world, mainstream media, university professors, scientists, celebrities, etc. have been spending millions of dollars each year for decades to convince the public that there is an existential climate “crisis” caused by human-produced CO2, primarily fossil fuels. In alarmist statements repeated ad nauseum, paid for by taxes and ignorant donors, and in myriad laws and regulatory policies, that societies must pay trillions of dollars and change the economics and welfare of the world. Their agenda is scientific and political fraud.

We could calculate a theoretical temperature increase that might be attributable to the not-to-exceed net 0.00025% of air that is partially human-produced. But, that theoretical calculation is too small to be validated by scientific experiments in the real world; so, the calculation is useless. This is an example of the overall science problem for the theory of human-CO2-caused global warming: it is not confirmable by real world experiments, therefore it is wrong until proven otherwise. And the proponents have already had at least 4 decades and enormous funding to attempt to prove their theory. There is no justification to proclaim a climate “crisis”, nor to induce fear in children, nor to spend millions of dollars more, much less to spend the trillions more demanded by proponents, nor to make large changes in energy supplies, transportation, global economies, nor to change the governance of nations.

All of this begs several important questions: What is the real agenda of these climate alarmists? How do we stop this giant global fraud? The real crisis is the climate alarmists, their actions, laws and policies. For much smaller frauds, ENRON for example, the fraudsters went to prison.

Emeritus Professor Richard S Lindzen, PhD, the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), provided my favorite quotes summarizing the situation:

“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world- that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”

Professor Lindzen also said, “Stop treating it [i.e., AGW…human-caused global warming/climate change] as a worthy opponent.  Do not ascribe reasonableness to the other side.  It is not reasonable, not true, not even plausible.”

The NOAA data used is available here: co2_annmean_mlo Download NOAA-Scripps spreadsheet