Richard Black BBC News 21 Nov 10;
Carbon emissions fell in 2009 due to the recession - but not by as much as predicted, suggesting the fast upward trend will soon be resumed.
Those are the key findings from an analysis of 2009 emissions data issued in the journal Nature Geoscience a week before the UN climate summit opens.
Industrialised nations saw big falls in emissions - but major developing countries saw a continued rise.
The report suggests emissions will begin rising by 3% per year again.
"What we find is a drop in emissions from fossil fuels in 2009 of 1.3%, which is not dramatic," said lead researcher Pierre Friedlingstein from the UK's University of Exeter.
"Based on GDP projections last year, we were expecting much more.
"If you think about it, it's like four days' worth of emissions; it's peanuts," he told BBC News.
The headline figure masked big differences between trends in different groups of countries.
Broadly, developed nations saw emissions fall - Japan fell by 11.8%, the UK by 8.6%, and Germany by 7% - whereas they continued to rise in developing countries with significant industrial output.
China's emissions grew by 8%, and India's by 6.2% - connected to the fact that during the recession, it was the industrialised world that really felt the pinch.
Back on track
Before the recession, emissions had been rising by about 3% per year, with the growth having accelerated around the year 2000.
The new analysis suggests that after the recession, those rates of growth are likely to resume.
"Probably, we'll be back on the track of the previous decade, 2009 having been a small blip," said Dr Friedlingstein.
The figures come just a week before the start of the UN climate summit, held this year in Cancun, Mexico.
Little progress is expected, following what is widely regarded as the failure of last year's Copenhagen summit.
But the projections - produced by the Global Carbon Project, a network of researchers around the world - may focus delegates' minds anew on the enduring issue in tackling climate change: decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions.
Speaking last week at a meeting of Indian and British business leaders aiming to develop joint clean energy projects, UK climate minister Greg Barker conceded this was the missing ingredient.
Fundamentally, he said, the question was "whether a transition to a low-carbon economy is compatible with continued economic growth - and no-one knows the answer, because no country has made the transition yet".
Carbon emissions dip in 2009, to jump in 2010 -report
* Drop in 2009 emissions less than estimated -study
* Growth in 2010 emissions driven by China, India
* Emissions from deforestation revised down to 10 pct
David Fogarty, Reuters AlertNet 21 Nov 10;
SINGAPORE, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Global emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide are on track to hit a record in 2010, a leading annual study said on Monday, driven largely by booming economies in China and India and their reliance on coal. The Global Carbon Project, a consortium of international research bodies, also said annual emissions dipped 1.3 percent in 2009 from 2008 because of the global financial crisis. But the fall was less than half the decrease estimated a year ago.
"The real surprise was that we were expecting a bigger dip due to the financial crisis in terms of fossil fuel emissions," said Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project and one of the co-authors of the study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.
The findings come a week before the start of U.N. climate talks in Mexico aimed at trying to find a way for nations to agree on a tougher pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
But Canadell also said new data and reduced loss of tropical rainforests showed that emissions from deforestation had declined and now comprised about 10 percent of mankind's greenhouse gas pollution. Previous studies have said 12 to 17 percent.
Scientists say rising levels of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, from burning fossil fuels and deforestation is heating up the planet.
Canadell said 2009's drop would prove to be a blip.
Emissions from fossil fuels were projected to increase by more than 3 per cent in 2010 if economic growth stayed on track, he told Reuters by telephone from Canberra, Australia. This would mark a return to the high growth rates of 2000-2008, he added.
"The implication of this kind of growth rate is that you're quickly moving into well beyond the 2 degrees Celsius warming target," he said, referring to a level beyond which scientists say the world risks "dangerous" climate change.
BIGGER SHARE
Voracious demand for coal, oil and gas by China, India and Brazil as well as demand for their goods was helping drive the increase.
"Emerging economies are taking a bigger share of the global production of wealth and they do it with more carbon-intense energy systems," said Canadell, a senior scientist with Australia's top research body, the CSIRO.
In 2009, declines in fossil fuel emissions were largest in developed nations. For example, emissions from the United States, the world's second largest carbon polluter, fell 6.9 percent, Britain fell 8.6 percent and Japan fell 11.8 percent.
But emissions from the world's top carbon polluter China rose 8 percent, while India's increased 6.2 percent and South Korea 1.4 percent.
Despite the slight dip in emissions in 2009, the study showed concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued rising, reaching a record of 387 parts per million (ppm). This is compared with levels of about 280 ppm at the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago.
Data shows the world has already warmed on average about 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century and scientists say the globe is on track to suffer more powerful storms, higher sea levels and severe droughts and floods that could disrupt food supplies.
The findings also show that in 2009 the global economy had slipped in terms of energy efficiency because of an increased share of fossil fuel CO2 emissions from emerging economies.
The study says the carbon intensity of global gross domestic product improved in 2009 less than half of the long-term average. Carbon intensity refers to fossil fuel emissions per unit of GDP.
"Both globally and for emerging economies, the fraction of fossil fuel emissions from coal increased in 2009, as in 2008," the study says.
Canadell said better data and forest conservation policies in Brazil and elsewhere were making a difference in curbing emissions from deforestation.
"We found global emissions from deforestation have decreased through the last decade by more than 25 percent compared to the 1990s," he said.
But emissions were still more than three billion tonnes of CO2 a year or roughly three times the total emissions of the Japanese economy.
(Editing by Miral Fahmy)
No letup in carbon emissions, scientists warn
Yahoo News 21 Nov 10;
PARIS (AFP) – Emissions of fossil-fuel gases that stoke climate change edged back less than hoped in 2009 as falls in advanced economies were largely outweighed by rises in China and India, scientists said Sunday.
For 2010, emissions are likely to resume their upward track, scaling a new peak, they warned.
Annual emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of oil, gas and coal were 30.8 billion tonnes, a retreat of only 1.3 percent in 2009 compared with 2008, a record year, they said in a letter to the journal Nature Geoscience.
The global decrease was less than half that had been expected, because emerging giant economies were unaffected by the downturn that hit many large industrialised nations.
In addition, they burned more coal, the biggest source of fossil-fuel carbon, while their economies struggled with a higher "carbon intensity," a measure of fuel-efficiency.
Emissions of fossil-fuel gases in 2009 fell by 11.8 percent in Japan, by 6.9 percent in the United States, by 8.6 percent in Britain, by seven percent in Germany and by 8.4 percent in Russia, the paper said.
In contrast, they rose by eight percent in China, by 6.2 percent in India and 1.4 percent in South Korea.
As a result, China strengthened its unenvied position as the world's No. 1 emitter of fossil-fuel CO2, accounting for a whopping 24 percent of the total.
The United States remained second, with 17 percent.
Fossil fuels account for 88 percent of all emissions from CO2, the principal "greenhouse gas" blamed for trapping the Sun's rays and causing global warming, the driver of potentially catastrophic changes to Earth's climate system.
Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere from all sources reached a record high of 387 parts per million (ppm), the study said.
"The 2009 drop in C02 emissions is less than half that anticipated a year ago," said Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at the University of Exeter in Britain, which led the study.
"This is because the drop in world gross domestic product was less than anticipated and the carbon intensity of world GDP, which is the amount of CO2 released per unit of GDP, improved by only 0.7 percent in 2009 -- well below its long-term average of 1.7 percent."
There was one spot of good news, though.
CO2 emissions from deforestation fell sharply, thanks to slowing forest loss in tropical countries and to a pickup in reforestation in Europe, temperate zones of Asia and North America.
In the 1990s, emissions from deforestation were more than 25 percent of the global total. In 2009, though, they were only 12 percent.
Despite this, the news for 2010 is likely to be grim.
CO2 from fossil fuels is likely to increase by more than three percent if predictions of 4.8 percent in world economic growth are right. This means the fall seen in 2009 will have been just a blip as carbon pollution resumes its fast upward track.
The report by the Global Carbon Project, linking leading climate scientists around the world, was published in the run-up to the November 29-December 10 UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
The conference aims at breaking the deadlock on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and channelling aid to poor, vulnerable countries after the near-fiasco at the world climate summit in Copenhagen.
Weak world economy cuts carbon pollution last year
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 21 Nov 10;
WASHINGTON – Here's one plus from the global economic recession: Carbon dioxide pollution last year dropped for the first time in a decade.
But it didn't last and it wasn't as big a drop as expected.
Burning fossil fuels to power factories, cars and airplanes spews out greenhouse gases that warm the world. But during the economic downturn, some factories shut down and people didn't drive or fly as much. The helped drop emissions about 1.3 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
There's been a close link between gross domestic product and pollution in recent decades, said study lead author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter in England. "The good part of the crisis is that it reduces emissions."
In the United States, the Energy Department said that emissions dropped 7 percent in 2009 because of three equal factors: the slowing economy, slightly better energy efficiency and cleaner energy.
Worldwide, it was mostly a matter of the economy, Friedlingstein said. In 2009, the world spewed nearly 34 billion tons (about 31 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide. That's a drop of 453 million tons from the previous year — what the U.S. emits in about 26 days.
The last time carbon dioxide pollution dropped worldwide was in 1999 and this was the biggest decrease since 1992, according to records by the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Lab. Despite last year's improvement, worldwide carbon emissions have increased by 25 percent since the year 2000.
Carbon pollution is probably already rising this year, the study authors said, and likely to set yet a record in 2010.
The same scientists last year had forecast almost a 3 percent drop in emissions for 2009 based on GDP projections from the International Monetary Fund. But the economy improved more than expected and developing countries kept increasing the amount of carbon dioxide they produced, Friedlingstein said.
Developing nations aren't using energy as efficiently and they weren't as affected by the recession as the west, he said.
China's carbon dioxide pollution jumped 8 percent from 2008 to 2009. India's went up about 6 percent, according to the study.
That's part of a dramatic shift in which countries are producing the most carbon dioxide. In 1990, the developed world produced 65 percent of the world's carbon dioxide, said study co-author Gregg Marland of the Oak Ridge National Lab. Now it is less than 43 percent as those countries have cut about 10 percent of their emissions while the developing world has more than doubled their overall emissions.
One bright note is that overall carbon dioxide emissions from the destruction of forests has slowed considerably, Friedlingstein said.
Despite that, it looks like the world cannot reach the goal set by international negotiations in Copenhagen last year of limiting global warming to a 3.6 degree (2 degree Celsius) temperature increase since industrialization, said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't involved in the study. Through the first 10 months of the year, 2010 is tied for the hottest year in 131 years of record keeping, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
"We are letting global warming emissions get away from us," Weaver said. "You can't say the climate science community didn't say 'I told you so.'"
