By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, December 4, 2011
Global emissions of
carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record
last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.
Emissions rose 5.9
percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon
Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers.
Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of
carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in
any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase
since 2003.
The increase
solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it
difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.
The researchers
said the high growth rate reflected a bounce-back from the 1.4 percent drop in
emissions in 2009, the year the recession had its biggest impact.
They do not expect
the extraordinary growth to persist, but do expect emissions to return to
something closer to the 3 percent yearly growth of the last decade, still a
worrisome figure that signifies little progress in limiting greenhouse gases.
The growth rate in the 1990s was closer to 1 percent yearly.
The combustion of
coal represented more than half of the growth in emissions, the report found.
In the United
States, emissions dropped by a remarkable 7 percent in the recession year of
2009, but rose by just over 4 percent last year, the new analysis shows. This
country is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, pumping 1.5
billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere last year.
The United States
was surpassed several years ago by China, where emissions grew 10.4 percent in
2010, with that country injecting 2.2 billion tons of carbon into the
atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions are usually measured by the weight of
carbon they contain.
The new figures
come as delegates from 191 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, for yet
another negotiating session in a global control effort that has been going on,
with minimal success, for the better part of two decades.
“Each year that
emissions go up, there’s another year of negotiations, another year of indecision,”
said Glen P. Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and
Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the group that produced the new
analysis. “There’s no evidence that this trajectory we’ve been following the
last 10 years is going to change.”
Scientists say the
rapid growth of emissions is warming the Earth, threatening the ecology and
putting human welfare at long-term risk. But their increasingly urgent pleas
that society find a way to limit emissions have met sharp political resistance
in many countries, including the United States, because doing so would entail
higher energy costs.
The new figures
show a continuation of a trend in which developing countries, including China
and India, have surpassed the wealthy countries in their overall greenhouse
emissions. In 2010, the combustion of fossil fuels and the production of cement
sent more than nine billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the new
analysis found, with 57 percent of that coming from developing countries.
Emissions per
person, though, are still sharply higher in the wealthy countries, and those
countries have been emitting greenhouse gases far longer, so they account for
the bulk of the excess gases in the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide,
the main such gas, has increased 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.
On the surface, the
figures of recent years suggest that wealthy countries have made headway in
stabilizing their emissions. But Dr. Peters pointed out that in a sense, the
rich countries have simply exported some of them.
The fast rise in
developing countries has been caused to a large extent by the growth of
energy-intensive manufacturing industries that make goods that rich countries
import. “All that has changed is the location in which the emissions are being
produced,” Dr. Peters said.
Many countries, as
part of their response to the economic crisis, invested billions in programs
designed to make their energy systems greener. While it is possible those will
pay long-term dividends, the new numbers suggest they have had little effect so
far.
The
financial crisis “was an opportunity to move the global economy away from a
high-emissions trajectory,” said a scientific paper about the new figures,
released online on Sunday by the journal Nature Climate Change. “Our results
provide no indication of this happening.”
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