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There will plenty of fools like Robertscribbler, and some scientists I know of who will be unable to publically admit this basic truth.
Fossil fuel emissions will reach an all-time high in 2017, scientists say — dashing hopes of progress
By
Chris Mooney
14 November, 2017
Global carbon
dioxide emissions are projected to rise again in 2017, climate
scientists reported Monday,
a troubling development for the environment and a major
disappointment for those who had hoped emissions of the climate
change-causing gas had at last peaked.
The
emissions from fossil fuel burning and industrial uses are projected
to rise by up to 2 percent in 2017, as well as to rise again in
2018, the scientists told a group of international
officials gathered for a United Nations climate conference in Bonn,
Germany.
Despite
global economic growth, total emissions held level from 2014 to 2016
at about 36 billion tons per year, stoking hope among many
climate change advocates that emissions had reached an all-time high
point and would subsequently begin to decline. But that was not to
be, the new analysis suggests.
“The
temporary hiatus appears to have ended in 2017,” wrote Stanford
University’s Rob Jackson, who along with colleagues at the Global
Carbon Project tracked 2017 emissions to date and projected them
forward. “Economic projections suggest further emissions growth in
2018 is likely.”
The
renewed rise is a troubling development for the global effort to
keep atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below the
levels needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. The
more we emit now, scientists say, the more severe cuts will have to
be later. That’s because of the very long atmospheric lifetime of
carbon dioxide, which means we can only emit a fixed amount in total
if we want to stay within key climate goals.
“It’s
sort of, lose one year now, you have to pick up five years later,”
said Glen Peters, one of the study’s co-authors and a
researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo.
Emissions
are forecast to reach around 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide
from fossil fuel burning and industrial activity in 2017, said the
group, which published
the resultsin
the journal Environmental Research Letters and more
detailed findings in
Earth System Science Data Discussions. The renewed increase is
driven largely by more fossil fuel burning in China and many
other nations.
“We’ve
been lucky in the last three years with emissions being flat without
any real policy driving it,” Peters said. “If we want to ensure
that emissions remain flat we have to put policies in place . . .
and the second step is to start to drive emissions down.”
Peters
said the 2017 number would be a record high for emissions from fossil
fuel burning and industrial uses (such as cement), although carbon
emissions from deforestation and land-use changes were actually
higher in 2015.
The
scientists also acknowledge some uncertainty in their estimate,
meaning that the 2017 emissions rise could be as low as 1 percent or
as high as 3 percent.
All
in all, the finding is bad news for global climate policy. The Paris
agreement, now supported by every nation except for the United
States, aims to limit the warming of the planet to “well below” 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels,
and to try to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit).
But
this requires emissions not just to stay flat but to go down —
rapidly.
“The
2017 emissions data make it crystal clear that urgent and very
serious emissions reductions are needed to stop global warming below
2° C, as was unanimously agreed in Paris,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a
climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
Research in Germany, said in an email. Rahmstorf was not
involved with the current work.
Rahmstorf
said there are currently about 600 billion remaining tons of carbon
dioxide that can be emitted if the world is to have a good chance of
keeping warming considerably below 2 degrees Celsius, and with some
40 billion tons of emissions each year, that leaves just 15 years.
“If
we start to ramp down emissions from now on we can stretch this
budget to last us about 30 years,” he said. “With every year that
we wait we will have to stop using fossil energy even earlier.”
The
rise of global emissions projected for the year 2017 in the current
research is attributable to multiple causes.
In
particular, China’s emissions were projected to increase by 3.5
percent in 2017 as the country consumed more of all three of the top
fossil fuels — coal, natural gas and oil. China is the single
largest emitting country.
India,
which has been experiencing rapid emissions growth, will pull
back to 2 percent growth in 2017 because of economic contraction, the
research suggests. Emissions from the United States and European
Union are projected to decline 0.4 percent and 0.2 percent,
respectively. But emissions for the rest of the globe – which, in
total, are even larger than China’s – will rise by close to 2
percent, according to the projection.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use and industry since 1960 for China, the United States, the European Union, India, and the Rest of the World (ROW), with open symbols representing projections for 2017. Data are from the Global Carbon Project and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC). From Jackson et al, Environmental Research Letters, 2017.
If
the increase continues, what many hoped was a plateau in emissions
seen from 2014 to 2016 could come to look more like a pause.
During
that era, many cited a broad “decoupling” of economic growth and
emissions growth, thanks in part to greater energy efficiency and
renewable energy. And there’s no denying that renewables are
continuing to grow around the world – making it hard to know quite
what to make of the current emissions rise.
“It’s
too early to say whether it’s a long-term trend, or just a one-off
little blip,” Peters said.
The
new results reinforce just how much of the globe’s emissions
trajectory depends on China, its largest emitter. China took a number
of steps to cut back coal emissions in the past three years, notes
Joanna Lewis, a Georgetown University professor who studies energy
trends in the country. This led to less coal use in the electricity
and industrial sectors.
“What
is less clear is whether these trends can continue,” Lewis said by
email. “Reduced plant operation and closures around the country are
putting huge pressures on local governments to deal with slowing
economic growth and unemployment. Overcapacity in these sectors, and
particularly an overbuild of coal plants, means there is pressure to
increase coal electricity production, which is often done through the
curtailment of renewables. As a result, China’s long term CO2
emissions trends are unclear at best.”
While
37 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and industry
represent the lion’s share of the globe’s emissions, there are
also several billion tons of carbon dioxide each year from
deforestation and other changes in how humans use land. When it comes
to global tree loss, there are also worrying
signs that
it is not abating as hoped.
There
are also rising
emissions of methane,
a greenhouse gas that is a stronger and faster warming
agent, although not nearly as long-lived in the atmosphere as
carbon dioxide. There is still a debate over where the methane growth
is coming from, but much of it could be from animal agriculture.
The
new findings will be immediately relevant to the proceedings in Bonn,
since one part of the agenda involves laying the groundwork for a
“facilitative
dialogue”
to take place next year, in which countries will take a hard look at
where their emissions are, and where they need to be, to live up to
the Paris goals.
Higher
emissions will, in this context, inevitably mean deeper cuts will be
required of participating nations — even as deadlines for avoiding
the most severe effects of global warming draw near.
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