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+80.3K per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/co2-emitted-today.
Estimated, not measured
This counter is a flow — how much we add. The number that actually determines how much heat the planet keeps is the stock: how much is already up there, which instruments measure directly.
Estimated tonnes of carbon dioxide released by human activity since midnight UTC — burning fossil fuels, making cement, and clearing land.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
38.1 Gt from fossil fuels plus 4.1 Gt from land-use change in 2025 — 42.2 Gt combined.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
NOAA publishes a real measurement related to this signal: Atmospheric CO₂. It is an instrument reading with a date attached, not an estimate. It measures a related quantity, not this counter's own: cite it for what it measures, and never as a measured value of the figure above.
The concentration is the stock these emissions feed, but not all of them stay: over the Global Carbon Budget's latest decade, about half of what was emitted remained in the air, and the ocean and land took up the rest.
The share of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide, averaged across NOAA's global network of sampling sites. It is the single number that most determines how much heat the planet keeps.
—ppm
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