English: This figure shows estimated anthropogenic carbon flows (primarily as carbon dioxide, CO₂) for five components of the Earth system. CO₂ flow amounts are graphed as gigatones carbon per year (GtC yr^-1) since year 1960. Two graphs at the left summarize the largest anthropogenic sources: fossil-carbon extraction+burning and land-use changes. Three graphs at the right summarize the corresponding Earth sinks: atmosphere, land, and oceans.

The flow through these sources and sinks of CO₂ has grown rapidly to exceed 11 GtC/yr as of year 2019. The land and ocean sinks have continued to take up about half of the source CO₂, and half has remained in the atmosphere. Note that there is a quantitative balance - within the data uncertainties - between these sources and sinks (i.e. a balanced budget). The net buildup of carbon in the atmosphere, land, and ocean sinks from the anthropogenic extraction of geologic carbon alone now exceeds 10 GtC/yr.

This evaluation of Earth's global carbon budget has been produced each year, starting 2006, by research scientists at the Global Carbon Project. The color-coded lines show how these estimates - based on best available data at the time - have varied. The grey shading in each graph shows the uncertainty bounds of data utilized for the latest year estimate. Historically, the land-use change source along with land and ocean sinks have maintained the larger uncertainties. Nevertheless, the increasing trend in flow magnitudes is well in excess of uncertainties.

Credit:

Friedlingstein, P., Jones, M., O'Sullivan, M., Andrew, R., Hauck, J., Peters, G., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Sitch, S., Le Quéré, C. and 66 others (2019) "Global carbon budget 2019". Earth System Science Data, 11(4): 1783–1838. doi:10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019. Material was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.