From KlimaNachrichten

By Frank Bosse

You will also have read and seen it: The CO2 increase from 2023 to 2024 reached a record level. That is completely correct. In the messages (e.g. here) you can also read something like

“The system is collapsing”.

The main emphasis is on a “decreasing effect of land sinks (including forests)” to remove CO2 from the air. What is truth and what is poetry, freely adapted from Goethe?

The data basis for all this news can be found at NOAA. Since the end of the 1950s, monthly measured values for the CO2 content of the atmosphere have been stored there.
Measurements are taken at Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

Also listed is such a graphic:

You can see (in black) a continuously rising line. This is to be expected as long as humans gain a lot of energy through carbon combustion. No matter what is burned, whether coal, gas, oil, wood or “energy plants” (dressed up as “biofuel”): Burning means oxidation, in addition to heat, plenty of CO2 is produced from the carbon of the energy source and the oxygen in the air.
A first logical step to reduce the increase in CO2 (this is a greenhouse gas and that undoubtedly warms physics) would therefore be to avoid oxidation as far as possible.
Unfortunately, Germany did not choose this path either, it would inevitably lead to nuclear power. Instead, in addition to renewable energies (no combustion), a lot of carbon continues to be converted if renewable energies do not provide enough, unfortunately a normal state.

So much for the climb itself. The red curve in the diagram above shows the actual measured values per month and they have a conspicuous course over each year. There is always a steep rise until May, an almost equally steep drop until the following September, after which it goes up again until the end of the year. Where does that come from?
Almost all of the land is concentrated in the northern hemisphere of the earth. The vegetation outside the tropics goes through a cycle: it is active in the months from April, the forests grow and bind a lot of CO2. It is (along with light and water) THE fuel of photosynthesis, which represents a “CO2 sink”.
And it is now supposed to show “signs of collapse”? Then the amount of CO2 removed in the figure above would have to be very conspicuously low in 2024. Over the years from 1960 onwards, an average value for May to September (end of growth of the plants) of around 5.7 ppm CO2 reduction is achieved. The deviations from this, plotted in multiples of the standard deviation (sigma), are recorded in this diagram:

One speaks of “unusual” when the deviation is more than 2 sigma, so coincidence must be 95% excluded. The “sink performance” of vegetation already did this in 1965 (-2.53 sigma) and 2000 (-2.05 sigma), not so in 2024 (-1.54 sigma)!
Contributing factors were discussed in the “The system is collapsing!” reports,
e.g. fires in the Amazon in 2023/24. These are not included in the sink performance of the vegetation of the extratropical northern hemisphere considered above.
Among other things, they did indeed lead to an observed record increase of 3.54 ppm from December 2023 to December 2024. These fires were also fueled by El Niño, which brings drought to the area. There are many factors at work!
If you look at the deviations from the linear black trend discussed above in the first image, you get this from 1960 onwards:

They were even higher in 1983 and 1998 than in 2024 with its temperature increase compared to 2022, the cause of which is still unclear in science, we reported.

So is there really so much excitement about the CO2 increase from 2023 to 2024, with “system collapse”? The sober data evaluation clearly says “no”!
What can be expected for 2025? The WMO employee quoted above denies the possibility of a forecast:

“We can no longer predict whether the 3.5 ppm increase will be repeated this year.” 

The inclined reader here could be smarter and consult the increase from August 2024 to August 2025 (last data point of the source): It is 2.5 ppm; in the previous year it was already 3.3 ppm.
The May-August reduction is also 1.1 ppm higher than in 2024. We no longer see an El Niño, which has a very decisive influence on growth. There is nothing unusual in behavior, not even retrospectively in the period up to 2024. What must be of real concern, however, is the increasing growth of the greenhouse gas as a whole, accompanied by warming. In the crucial “sector” of energy, the only way to counter this is really something measurable through real “decarbonization”.
What Germany is doing here is well below the EU average. It is also very likely that things will not get better in this country, new gas-fired power plants are objectively unavoidable if the security of energy supply is to be guaranteed.
The deeper cause of this is now of a physical nature after a political decision to abolish nuclear power. After that, something was formed that is called a “forced move sequence” in chess. Germany is a “driven country” when it comes to CO2 emissions, it has put itself in a pitiful, purely ideologically determined position with the phase-out of non-carbon-oxidizing nuclear power and the one-sided fixation on low-density “renewable energies”.

This is the “truth” in the figures for the CO2 data, the rest is “poetry”.