What if we could see carbon emissions?

I read a book a couple of years ago where the author imagined that CO2 emissions had a colour and were visible to the naked eye. (I think it was Arno Kopecky’s book of essays, The Environmentalist’s Dillemma, but I seem to have uncharacteristically mislaid my copy and I can’t check.) If you could see the pollution, he argued, we’d have fixed climate change long ago.

There’s a similar logic to this video from NASA, which I’m using in the Luton Youth Climate Conference today. They have visualised greenhouse gas emissions over the course of a year, and released a series of videos showing what that might look like for different regions of the earth. This is the video for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, drawing on real-time CO2 emissions data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

You can look up the exact methodology on the website of NASA’s Scientific Visualisation Studio, where there are lots of interesting things to see – including how the earth ‘breathes’ through a year in the carbon cycle. One important point with this particular video is that greenhouse gases are colour-coded, and that emissions from fossil fuels are the dull yellow colour that dominates.

There are a couple of things that jump out to me, as I watch through the annual cycle. The first is that we can see very clearly that the sources of fossil fuel pollution are mainly in the global north. As we already know, fossil emissions are negligible from most of Africa, and satelite measurements bear that out.

The second thing I notice is how those emissions don’t stay over Europe and the Middle East. We all share one atmosphere, and by the end of the video the entire globe is covered, regardless of where those fossil fuels were originally burned. Those suffering the worst effects of climate change are often dealing with somebody else’s mess, and NASA’s visualisation makes that plain.

In reality, greenhouse gases are invisible. But I suspect that Kopecky is right – if we could see the pollution, we would have fixed the climate a long time ago.