It’s one thing to talk about the impacts of global warming, but a recent NASA video is providing a visualization of just how much carbon dioxide is being dumped into the atmosphere and where it ends up being distributed. As the push for political action on the issue heats up, the video is sure to drive the argument that the CO2 issue is a very real one indeed.

The simulation, which a supercomputer compiled over 75 days at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to create, shows that most of the CO2 — not surprisingly — is coming from the United States, Europe, and East Asia, according to National Geographic. Once released, the CO2 tends to stay in the Northern Hemisphere, blanketing the entire northern half of the globe with carbon dioxide and largely keeping out of the Southern Hemisphere.

The simulation also shows that the oceans and forests wipe away CO2 emissions during the summer months when foliage is at its peak, only to allow carbon dioxide to once again flood the atmosphere in the winter months.

An estimated 36 billion metric tons of CO2 is released into the atmosphere from human activity like burning fossil fuels. CO2 concentrations topped 400 parts per million for the first time ever in the spring of 2013, and scientists believe that concentrations above 450 parts per million would result in “dangerous” climate disruptions, although some would argue that humanity has already reached that point.

More tools are on their way to study the effects of fossil fuels: NASA launched its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite in July to track CO2 emissions more precisely. The satellite should be operational in 2015, and it could provide some more insight on just how much effect forests and oceans have in scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Scientists fear that they may have already reached their limits in how much CO2 they can take in.

Scientists are pushing on a global scale to get world leaders to enact policies that would stop global warming in its tracks by capping fossil fuels and increasing the usage of alternative energy sources.

Global warming could cause the rising of sea levels, extinction of species, more violent storms, and more prevalent famines. As a result, lawmakers have pushed for measures now to deal with the problem, but there is still opposition to stricter measures from those who question humanity’s impact on the environment.

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s surface temperature has increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius this century, and about two-thirds of that rise happened since 1980.