Saturday 4 October 2008

Global CO2 Emissions Rise to Record Levels, but Global Cooling Since 2002



Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement manufacturing are rising faster than the worst-case scenario drawn up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to the latest worldwide carbon budget, released by the Global Carbon Project, CO2 levels rose by 3.5% a year between 2000 and 2007, compared with 2.7% as calculated by the IPCC. During the 1990s, emissions rose at 0.9% a year. "For a decade we've been using the [IPCC] middle-ground scenario, while we're actually in a different realm of emissions," says Pep Canadell, the project's executive director. China is now the biggest emitter of CO2 and responsible for 21% of the world's emissions — up from 14% in 2002. This knocks the United States into second place, contributing 19% of global emissions. India is fourth, but looks set to take third place from Russia this year. Currently, more than half of the global emissions come from less developed countries.

Link for image above showing global cooling since 2002:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MSUCRUCO2.jpg

2 comments:

Climate Realist said...

There is a new blog called "Climate realist" take a look at it here:- http://climatechangerealist.blogspot.com/

Its a more lighthearted look at climate change, from the point of view of a Siamese cat called Mimi and her human called "John".

I would argue that global cooling has occured since 1998 not 2002 and if you discount the El Nino of that year, possibly earlier, in line with change of solar activity and subsequent heat loss from the planet.

Paul Biggs said...

True, the instrumental record year was 1998, but the trend is downwards since 2002. As Roy Spencer says, when referring to the lower troposphere data:

"When one takes into consideration that the cooling from the Mt. Pinatubo eruption and the warming from the 1997-98 El Nino event were not part of any underlying long-term trend, we can imagine that globally-averaged temperatures were flat from 1990 until 2000, then there was a brief warming until about 2002, after which temperatures have once again remained flat. Note that the longer temperatures remain flat the greater the warming that will be required to put us back ‘on track’ to match the climate model projections used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The coming months and years should be interesting."