Emissions & Temperatures Rise as Leaders Meet in Mexico

In 2009, the overall amount of global fossil fuel emissions was still the second highest in human history, at 30.8bn tons, just below the all-time high of 2008. In 2010 the emissions from burning fossil fuels are expected to rise again, pushing it to record levels. The results of the study by the Global Carbon Project will be used to put pressure on environment ministers meeting in Cancun, Mexico this month for the latest UN meeting to come to a global agreement on cutting emissions. Will Cancun achieve more than Copenhagen?

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent in The Telegraph – UK (21 November 2010):

The research, led by the University of Exeter and involving the University of East Anglia, found that growth in CO2 levels fell in 2009, though by less than expected, because of the economic recession.

However despite continuing problems in the economy in 2010 global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will increase by three per cent, according to the annual survey.

The United Nations (UN) has been trying to reduce emissions by asking countries to switch to low carbon energy like nuclear or wind and improve energy efficiency.

In the developed world, where there is the money and infrastructure to switch to new technologies and access to fossil fuels is running out anyway, this has largely been successful.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, found UK emissions were 8.6 per cent lower in 2009 than in 2008. Similar figures apply to USA, Japan, France, Germany, and most other industrialised nations.

Emissions from deforestation in tropical countries is also down because of international efforts to stop illegal logging.

However the massive growth of developing countries mean that more fossils are being burned than ever before. CO2 emissions from China, where there is also a large amount of coal, increased by 8 per cent in 2009.

This meant that the drop in emissions was much smaller in 2009 than the 2.8 per cent originally expected. Also the overall amount of global fossil fuel emissions was still the second highest in human history, at 30.8bn tons, just below the all-time high of 2008.

In 2010 the emissions from burning fossil fuels are expected to rise again, pushing the amount of CO2 produced by mankind to record levels.

The rise is largely because of the massive increase in the burning of oil and coal in countries like China and India as the population grows and people demand more electricity and goods.

“Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – the main contributor to global warming – show no sign of abating and may reach record levels in 2010,” the study stated.

Concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already more than 387 ppm (parts per million) and is expected to go up further.

Scientists believe that carbon dioxide is trapping heat in the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm in a process known as the ‘greenhouse effect’. It is feared that if concentrations increase further global temperature rise will be pushed beyond 3.8F (2C), causing floods and droughts across the world.

The results of the study by the Global Carbon Project will be used to put pressure on environment ministers meeting in Cancun, Mexico this month for the latest UN meeting to come to a global agreement on cutting emissions.

Scientists agree that global emissions need to halve by 2050 in order to keep temperature rise below 2C.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Associated Press (22 November 2010):

The last time the world warmed, 120,000 years ago, the Cancun coastline was swamped by a 7-foot (2.1-meter) rise in sea level in a few decades. A week from now at that Mexican resort, frustrated negotiators will try again to head off a new global deluge.

The disappointment of Copenhagen — the failure of the annual U.N. conference to produce a climate agreement last year in the Danish capital — has raised doubts about whether the long-running, 194-nation talks can ever agree on a legally binding treaty for reining in global warming.

“It’s clear after Copenhagen that the U.N. process is ‘on probation,’” acknowledged Alden Meyer of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, a veteran observer and supporter of the process.

Even the Mexican hosts of the Nov. 29-Dec. 10 U.N. conference question whether “it is the best way to work — with 194 countries,” as Mexico’s environment secretary, Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, put it.

“We must be really open and sincere. Do we need to make an evolution to a new methodology?” Elvira asked in an Associated Press interview.

The core failure has been in finding a consensus formula for mandatory reductions in countries’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases, byproducts of power plants, other industries, agriculture and automobiles.

For 13 years, the United States has refused to join the rest of the industrialized world in the Kyoto Protocol, a binding pact to curb fossil-fuel emissions by modest amounts. More recently, as China, India and other emerging economies exempted from the 1997 Kyoto pact have sharply increased emissions, they have rejected calls by the U.S. and others to commit by treaty to restraints.

No one expects Cancun to resolve that standoff. Instead, delegates will focus on climate financial aid, deforestation and other secondary “building blocks” to try to revive momentum toward an umbrella deal at next year’s conference in South Africa or at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 2012.

“We expect a positive attitude and a restoration of confidence in the multilateral system at Cancun,” said Grenada’s U.N. ambassador, Dessima Williams, chair of an alliance of island nations already facing early impacts of climate change.

While the global talks plod along, those impacts seem to be accelerating.

The world’s warming oceans, for example, are rising at twice the 20th century’s average rate, expanding from the heat and the runoff of melting land ice, says the Geneva-based World Climate Research Program. More ice is melting in Greenland and Antarctica than earlier thought, worried scientists report. Authoritative projections of 2007 — that seas might rise by up to 0.59 meters (1.94 feet) by 2100 — now appear too conservative.

The Yucatan peninsula, where the upcoming talks will take place, once experienced how quickly warming can remake coastlines. Researchers studying fossilized reefs near Cancun report that waters rose at least two meters (6.6 feet) in as little as 50 years during the last natural warming period between ice ages.

Temperatures then, 120 millennia ago, were only 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today. In their 2007 assessment, the U.N. network of climate scientists projected temperatures will rise this century by up to 6.4 degrees C (11.5 degrees F), depending on whether and how much emissions are rolled back.

The U.N. network — the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — recommended emissions be cut by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F) above preindustrial levels. They already rose 0.7 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) in the 20th century.

In a nonbinding “Copenhagen Accord” from the 2009 conference, industrialized nations pledged reductions of only 18 percent overall, analysts say. The U.S. pledged a 3 percent reduction. China and other developing nations said they would work to rein in emissions growth.

Only a binding treaty with deep reductions can ensure the world will avoid the worst environmental upheavals of climate change, scientists and conservationists say. But the takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives by Republicans, many of whom dismiss strong scientific evidence of human-caused warming, all but rules out U.S. action for at least two years.

Instead, the Cancun negotiators hope at least for agreement on a “green fund” to disburse aid that developed countries promised at Copenhagen — $100 billion a year by 2020 — for developing countries to adapt to a changing climate by building seawalls and shifting farming patterns, for example, and to install clean energy sources.

The developing world hopes, too, for better terms for transferring patented green technology from richer nations. In a third area, delegates aim to make progress on the complex issue of compensating poorer nations for protecting their forests, key to the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Parallel to the U.N. talks, often with U.S. leadership, governments have been making limited, voluntary side deals to chip away at emissions. That’s “laudable and helpful,” Grenada’s Williams said, but “we have to go beyond that, to take collective action.”

Encroaching seas already are contaminating drinking water and damaging housing in low-lying islands, she said. “It is overwhelming our capacity to stay alive.”

Source: www.unfccc.int