Human-induced carbon stress power upon earth: integrated data set, rheological findings and consequences

Jonas, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1269-4145, Bun, R., Ryzha, I., & Żebrowski, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5283-8049 (2025). Human-induced carbon stress power upon earth: integrated data set, rheological findings and consequences. Science of the Total Environment 992 e179922. 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.179922.

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Abstract

In this study we take the position of an outer-space observer to understand Earth's planetary carbon-climate response to stress from a rheological perspective; with stress upon the Earth atmosphere–land and ocean system given by the uninterrupted increase in cumulative CO2 emissions caused by humankind between 1850 and 2021. This perspective complements the global carbon mass balance perspective applied by the carbon community. It gives reason to suspect that Earth is in an even worse environmental condition than commonly believed.

We apply a rheological (stress–strain) analogue model, a Maxwell body, consisting of elastic and damping (viscous) elements to reflect the overall behavior of the atmosphere–land and ocean system under the influence of global warming. For an observer it is the overall strain response of that system – expansion of the atmosphere by volume and uptake of CO2 by sinks – that is unknown.

Our rheological study addresses two important issues that had neither been mentioned previously nor elsewhere. Firstly, we quantify stress power exerted by humans upon Earth and its two subsystems, atmosphere and land-ocean, for 1850–2021.

Secondly, we compute the second derivative by time of the system's delay time, which indicates that Earth experienced a major change in its dynamics in the past by exhibiting a turning point which is when the deacceleration rate of the system's delay time goes through a maximum, some time between 1925 and 1945. After passing through the maximum, Earth's land-ocean subsystem does not respond characteristically to stress anymore; that is, outside its natural regime.

This finding suggests that the Earth system is on a slow end-of-life path since then, not necessarily collapsing as a whole; but, nonetheless, that it is becoming increasingly vulnerable to sub-global, threshold-transgressing incidents acting bottom-up which may cause the entire atmosphere–land and ocean system to ultimately collapse.

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