By Alex Morales
Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Manmade emissions of carbon dioxide grew 2.5 percent last year as international efforts to fight global warming fail to curb the main gas blamed for rising temperatures, a team of scientists said.
Burning fossil fuels, making cement and changing land use together produced 9.94 billion metric tons of carbon compared with 9.7 billion tons in 2006, the Canberra, Australia-based Global Carbon Project reported today. Average annual growth since 2000 is about four times the mean in the 1990s.
Leaders from about 180 nations are locked in a two-year round of talks aimed at crafting a global pact to fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide that's lofted into the skies. Greenhouse gases threaten to accelerate warming to levels that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year will increase floods and droughts, raise sea levels and extinguish thousands of species.
``It's been all talk and until there's action, emissions will continue to go up,'' Martin Parry, who last year co-chaired one of the IPCC's three working groups, said yesterday in a telephone interview from his home in eastern England. ``The window of opportunity we have in order to achieve an international agreement and act upon it is beginning to close. We have potentially serious damage in store.''
Emissions need to peak by 2015 and drop by 50 percent by 2050 to limit warming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) more than the level before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, the UN panel proposed. Global talks aim to close a deal at a conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009.
`Huge Problem'
With emissions currently tracking the high end of scenarios examined by the UN, temperatures may rise as much as 6.3 degrees by 2100, said Corinne Le Quere, a member of the Global Carbon Project's steering committee. That would make inevitable the melting over a millennium of Greenland's ice sheet, with enough water to raise sea levels by about 7 meters, she said.
``Things are happening very, very fast,'' Le Quere said in a telephone interview from Cambridge, the U.K., where she works at the British Antarctic Survey. ``We already know this is a huge problem but the actions that are taken now are extremely important in determining the rate of warming.''
The emissions growth rate shrank from the 2.6 percent gain registered a year earlier, which can be explained by small variations in weather and energy needs, Le Quere said.
James Hansen
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to 383 parts per million molecules, up 2 ppm from a year earlier, the study said.
Prior to industrialization there were 280 molecules of the gas per million molecules in the atmosphere. James Hansen, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's top climate change scientist, has said maintaining a level above 350 is dangerous, meaning emissions need to be drawn down.
The Global Carbon Project, based in Canberra, Australia, is an association of scientists from organizations including the Campbell, Australia-based Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Association and the U.S. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
Today's figures show oceans and soils, known as ``sinks,'' absorbed 54 percent of emissions, helping to contain warming. The remainder of the CO2 went into the atmosphere, where it traps the sun's energy. While the sinks are increasing the tonnage of CO2 they absorb, there's evidence their efficiency -- the percentage of total emissions they take in -- is waning, Le Quere said.
``The ocean is absorbing carbon less fast than we thought, leaving more CO2 in the atmosphere, making the problem of stabilization of CO2 bigger,'' she said.
Global Deal
The pact being discussed at the global talks will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Under that agreement, 37 developed countries agreed to cut emissions from 1990 levels by a combined 5 percent by 2012. The largest emitter, the U.S., never signed Kyoto, and developing countries weren't set targets.
Since Kyoto was brokered, global emissions trends have altered, with China in 2006 overtaking the U.S. as the biggest producer of carbon dioxide, and India now close to overtaking Russia to become the third-biggest emitter, Gregg Marland, an environmental scientist at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee said in an e-mailed statement. The laboratory contributed to today's report.
Even so, developed countries are responsible for 80 percent of historic emissions and it's up to them to take the lead in slashing output of the gas, Le Quere said.
``This is a reality check of what's actually happening: The industrialized countries have to cut their emissions much, much faster than they are doing now.'' she said. ``There's a lot of effort to curb emissions of CO2 but the scale is not big enough. It has to be on a much, much larger scale. The scale of the problem is enormous.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net
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