A collection of sobering take-home points from a consortium of climate scientists and economists from around the world — the Global Carbon Project — and their findings for 2010, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change:
- The amount of man-made carbon dioxide released in 2010 reached a record 10 billion tonnes, nearly 6% higher than in 2009.
- Global CO2 emissions since 2000 are tracking the high end of the projections used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which far exceed 2º warming by 2100.
- The past decade has seen an unprecedented increase in greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels, deforestation and the manufacture of cement, resulting in an average rise of 3.1% per year. This compares with an annual increase of just 1% per year during the 1990s.
- The global emissions of carbon dioxide from man-made sources have increased by nearly 50% over the past two decades, culminating in the release of a record 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2010. The trend has continued on the same trajectory during 2011.
- We are now tracking the high end of the worst case scenario of the IPCC. At the moment we are very far away from keeping within the target of a 2º increase in global temperatures by the end of the century. We are more on course for a 4º rise, and possibly as high as 6º if carbon feedbacks begin.
- In the developed world, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1.3% in 2008 and fell again by 7.6% in 2009, rising by 3.4% in 2010.
- In the developing world, dominated by China, emissions increased by 4.4% in 2008, increased by 3.9% in 2009 and 7.6% in 2010.
- The figure for 2010 cancels out a downturn in emissions the year before.
Anyone get the feeling we’re going backwards? Just like the politics at Durban, the maths here suggests as much.
If only you had added a graph. Tamas will be out in force as soon as he gets home from work.
It is actually worse than 10 Gt/a of CO2, it’s 10 Gt/a of carbon (link) . That would equate to 36.7 Gt/a of CO2, about half of which stays in the atmosphere with the rest being buffered up in the ocean surface.
Anyone wanting to keep up-to-date with the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere would get a seasonally corrected value in occasional visits to a link such as NOAA’s graph, which is updated monthly. Currently (December 2011) it is closing on 391 ppmv.
The acceleration is not particularly sharp, nor is it news that the CO2 level is getting worse. The rate of increase of the level of CO2 has been bad (~2 ppmv/a) for many years past, with no hint of levelling off at any point.
But let me reassure you – it doesnt change the argument at all: we are hellbent for disaster. The kiddies might want us to do something effective about it.
Fear not, its only extinction, a gift we’ve given so many species we deserve it for ourselves. I pity the baby boomers tho, Gens X Y & Z are going to scapegoat them something chronic before too long.
The assumption here is that climate sensitivity to CO2 is a known quantity. It isn’t.
Why do you think Mann et al are busy pursuing defensive hypotheses to explain the plateauing of global temps in the past decade? Rapid increase in CO2 emissions is not having the predicted effect.
Frank Campbell, it’s disingenuous to suggest (in a typical roundabout and underhand fashion) that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. You know that there is and we know that as atmospheric CO2 content increases, global temperatures increase too. The connection may not be direct or immediate but over the longer period it seems to be inexorable. Do you have evidence to the contrary?