marklynas.orgReality check of the week 13 November 06
Global carbon emissions are now growing four times faster than they were in the past decade, according to a report in the scientific journal Nature. Between 1990 and 1999 the average CO2 growth rate was 0.8%. Now it is 3.2%. Worryingly, 40% of this growth is attributable to China’s current economic boom – and the Chinese leadership has ruled out any emissions targets.
Given all the depressing news about countries missing their targets (see below) this should hardly be suprising, as the report concedes. But what is most striking is that the world is now increasingly far away from any of the IPCC’s ‘stabilisation pathways’ which would have begun to scale back emissions and their associated warming impacts.
In other words, all the efforts so far to reduce global emissions – from Kyoto downwards – have had a very clear impact: zero.
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Not that surprising though...
Not that surprising though...
.. as the 1990’s don’t really constitute a “normal” decade due to the economic fallout from the collapse of the nominally Communist bloc centred on the Soviet Union.
I’d be interested to see what the average growth rate was for the 80’s for example.
However, the main point still stands: we are still just talking about this problem and have not yet started to take any effective action to address it.
It’s very frustrating to find that, as 2007 approaches, effectively nothing is being done. The Rio Earth Summit was in 1990…