From the European Commission Joint Research Centre
Global CO2 emissions continue to increase
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming – increased by 3% last year, reaching an all-time high of 34 billion tonnes in 2011. In China, the world’s most populous country, average emissions of CO2 increased by 9% to 7.2 tonnes per capita.
China is now within the range of 6 to 19 tonnes per capita emissions of the major industrialised countries. In the European Union, CO2 emissions dropped by 3% to 7.5 tonnes per capita. The United States remain one of the largest emitters of CO2, with 17.3 tones per capita, despite a decline due to the recession in 2008-2009, high oil prices and an increased share of natural gas. These are the main findings of the annual report ‘Trends in global CO2 emissions’, released today by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL).
Based on recent results from the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) and latest statistics on energy use and relevant activities such as gas flaring and cement production, the report shows that global CO2 emissions continued to grow in 2011, despite reductions in OECD countries. Weak economic conditions, a mild winter, and energy savings stimulated by high oil prices led to a decrease of 3% in CO2 emissions in the European Union and of 2% in both the United States and Japan. Emissions from OECD countries now account for only one third of global CO2 emissions – the same share as that of China and India combined, where emissions increased by 9% and 6% respectively in 2011. Economic growth in China led to significant increases in fossil fuel consumption driven by construction and infrastructure expansion. The growth in cement and steel production caused China’s domestic coal consumption to increase by 9.7%.
The 3% increase in global CO2 emissions in 2011 is above the past decade’s average annual increase of 2.7%, with a decrease in 2008 and a surge of 5% in 2010. The top emitters contributing to the 34 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted globally in 2011 are: China (29%), the United States (16%), the European Union (11%), India (6%), the Russian Federation (5%) and Japan (4%).
Cumulative CO2 emissions call for action
An estimated cumulative global total of 420 billion tonnes of CO2 were emitted between 2000 and 2011 due to human activities, including deforestation. Scientific literature suggests that limiting the rise in average global temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels – the target internationally adopted in UN climate negotiations – is possible only if cumulative CO2 emissions in the period 2000-2050 do not exceed 1 000 to 1 500 billion tonnes. If the current global trend of increasing CO2 emissions continues, cumulative emissions will surpass this limit within the next two decades.
Fortunately, this trend is being mitigated by the expansion of renewable energy supplies, especially solar and wind energy and biofuels. The global share of these so-called modern renewables, which exclude hydropower, is growing at an accelerated speed and quadrupled from 1992 to 2011. This potentially represents about 0.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided as a result of using renewable energy supplies in 2011, which is close to Germany’s total CO2 emissions in 2011.
Background information
PBL – the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
PBL is the Netherlands’ national institute for strategic policy analysis in the fields of environment, nature and spatial planning. It contributes to improving the quality of political and administrative decision making by conducting outlook studies, analyses and evaluations in which an integrated approach is considered paramount. Policy relevance is the prime concern in all PBL studies, for which independent and scientifically sound research is carried out on a solicited and unsolicited basis.
The Joint Research Centre (JRC)
As the Commission’s in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre’s mission is to provide EU policies with independent, evidence-based scientific and technical support throughout the whole policy cycle. Working in close cooperation with policy Directorates-General, the JRC addresses key societal challenges while stimulating innovation through developing new methods, tools and standards, and sharing its know-how with the Member States, the scientific community and international partners. Key policy areas include: environment and climate change; energy and transport; agriculture and food security; health and consumer protection; information society and digital agenda; safety and security, including nuclear; all supported through a cross-cutting and multidisciplinary approach.
EDGAR – Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research
The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) uses the latest scientific information and data from international statistics on energy production and consumption, industrial manufacturing, agricultural production, waste treatment/disposal and the burning of biomass, in order to model emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants for all countries of the world in a comparable and consistent manner. EDGAR (version 4.2) is also unique in its provision of historical emissions data for 20 years prior to 1990, the reference year for the Kyoto protocol. Emissions are publicly available through the EDGAR website, hosted by the JRC.
Links:
“Trends in global CO2 emissions” report: http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/CO2REPORT2012.pdf
EDGAR website: http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu
EDGAR website: http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu
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19 July: Reuters: Nina Chestney/Jeff Coelho: UN sees future for carbon scheme despite price drop
The United Nations’ carbon offset market has a long future in helping the world curb man-made greenhouse gas emissions, even with carbon prices at record lows, the executive chairman of the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) said on Thursday…
The benchmark CER contract hit record lows below 3 euros this week…
“I don’t see the current low prices as affecting the longevity of the CDM,” Maosheng Duan, the executive board chairman of the CDM, said in an emailed statement.
“The CDM is a mature mechanism that has proved its worth,” he said…
But U.N. offset schemes will remove at best 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent over a five-year compliance period through 2012, barely making a dent in some 170 billion in fossil-fuel emissions over that time, analysts say…
But the crash in prices has been hard on many project developers, particularly those that have contracted to buy carbon credits at prices much higher than current levels.
“This downward movement is extremely negative for project developers,” said Gus Hochschild, alternative energy equity analyst at Mirabaud Securities, adding low prices could cause the liabilities of some companies to outstrip their cash positions.
Some project developers, such as Camco International and Trading Emissions Plc have been renegotiating or adjusting their contracts in a bid to help cut losses…
Prices for CERs often follow movements in EU permits called EU allowances (EUAs) and both markets are over-supplied, which has dragged prices to record low levels.
Even if EUAs recover when details of the Commission’s fix emerge, CERs could continue to drop to near zero, some analysts warned this week…
“It is certainly not the death of the market and we expect CERs to carry on trading even if we won’t see the heady prices of 13 euros again,” a carbon trader said.
“I can understand panic when a lot of companies’ portfolios are five euros under water but the EU and U.N. have the ability to limit supply and decide which credits are eligible and where. It’s not all doom and gloom,” he added.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/19/un-carbon-price-idINL6E8IJFUT20120719
Only Western capitalist pigs need to suffer the consequence of excess CO2. All problems are caused by the West, and then if there is a tie, by Bush.
Who’s #1? Canada, probably? Crazy that the US isn’t first in per capita emissions anymore.
Of the larger economies, Australia is the biggest per capita CO2 emitter, because we don’t have nuclear and very little hydro.
Canada is the biggest per capita energy consumer, but they have nuclear and lots of hydro.
In Washington State hydro is no longer considered a renewable energy source. I guess the thinking is global warming is going to eliminate all our rain. Or magic happens. What ever, on the I-90 corridor in the Kittitas plateau above the mighty Columbia river, hundreds of feet above sea level, there is a huge new cluster of wind farms that are slowing dying, as they all do. In 20 years the Columbia will still be rolling along and these windmills will be rusted hulks. Proving that wind power is renewable – necessarily often.
Emissions in the Industrial countries flat since 1990. All growth has been in the developing countries – and all evidence indicates that’s going to continue.
“Geoff says:
July 19, 2012 at 10:03 pm
Emissions in the Industrial countries flat since 1990. All growth has been in the developing countries – and all evidence indicates that’s going to continue.”
Yeah and New Zealand CO2 emissions didn’t rank on that list at at mere 0.2% of Global emissions. Yet we’ve been strangled with an ETS while some loonie local authorities along with the Green lobby are trying to reduce our emissions further by upto 40% by 2020.
So we sacrifice our economy for zip, nada, zero improvement on Global Emissions while China and India steam ahead with theirs.
I have a question. If the human emission of CO2 is only a small part (3%?) of the natural emission, why does the global amount of CO2 continue to increase? If the plants can absorb 97% of the CO2, why cant’ they absorb 100%? Maybe I am missing something?
Jan Meeus: It’s an inventory situation. There’s a large stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, about 830 GtC, of which about 12% p.a. is continuously being recycled down from the atmosphere and back up again from the planet’s land and sea, while every year there are emissions of 9-10 GtC of which on average only 56% is added to the opening stock of 830 GtC – but then joins the annual fluxes up and down. CO2 is however fungible, like money, so we never know which particular molecules are in the 12% flux this year or will be in 2013.
The IPCC’s TAR (Houghton et al 2001) and Houghton’s own book (2004) give clear accounts of the process I have just described, but it is mostly absent from the Nobel prize winners’ tosh in IPCC AR4 2007.
“Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming – ”
BRILLIANT.
Now where did the EC “inhouse science service” get that little gem of misinformation from ?
So the addition of these graphs should look the same as the rise in CO2?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
Werner Brozek says:
‘On all data sets, the different times for a slope that is flat for all practical purposes range from 10 years and 9 months to 15 years and 7 months.’
‘For all practical purposes’ – that, I presume, is the Mark I eyeball? 🙂
You can’t simply fish for the longest period in the data for a flat trend line. After all, what’s to stop me simply fishing for a steeply positive trend over more recent temperature data and using that as an argument that perhaps warming had stopped, but that it’s restarted faster than ever?
No – we must not look at the slope of regression lines in isolation. We need to apply some statistics to try to identify whether you’re looking at a genuine warming signal – or lack of one – or simply interannual variation. And that variation is large, especially in satellite data. We expect to see ~decade-long periods of flat lines with simple linear regressions. You can prove this to yourself by creating synthetic data of constant global warming with noise superimposed on top. Lo and behold – you get ‘flat’ periods, but we know the global warming signal is still there. After all, we created the data!
Revisiting some of your datasets you suggest, using Skeptical Science’s trend calculator (which at least attempts to put error bars on the slopes):
UAH Oct 2001: 0.018 ±0.398 °C/decade
GISTEMP May 2001: -0.006 ±0.212 °C/decade
HADCRUT3v Jan 1997: 0.003 ±0.141 °C/decade
RSS Dec 1996: 0.005 ±0.247 °C/decade
Look at the error bars on all those slopes: all of them include 0 °C/decade warming, but all of them also include the expected warming trend of 0.017 °C/decade. They also don’t exclude acclerating warming, over 0.14 °C/decade.
No – it’s simply not fair to say that these data show global warming has stopped or slowed.Tempting though it might be, you cannot wish away those error bars that show ongoing warming is perfectly consistent within those data periods.
So how long do we need to establish statistical significance in any global temperature data? Tamino has shown that in NASA GISS 15 years of data gives us a 50/50 chance of detecting a 0.017C/decade trend. Looking at shorter periods is simple folly.
Hopefully now you’ll see why the ‘global warming stopped eight/nine/ten years ago’ meme is so persistent. It’s appealing but it’s also very wrong. Flat slopes are practically guaranteed in short periods of temperature dat, and the similarly likely steeply positive ones curiously get neglected…
So what!
It amuses me that CO2 production is always given as a mass of CO2 as if this was important. What is important, IF the GHG theory is correct, is the proportion that human output is of the total annual budget. This continues to be at around 4% of the total so not of real significance.
The alarmists should stop volcanic activity to do a real job on this problem(?)sarc. off.
trccurtin says:
July 20, 2012 at 12:33 am
Jan Meeus: It’s an inventory situation. There’s a large stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, about 830 GtC, of which about 12% p.a. is continuously being recycled down from the atmosphere and back up again from the planet’s land and sea, while every year there are emissions of 9-10 GtC of which on average only 56% is added to the opening stock of 830 GtC – but then joins the annual fluxes up and down. CO2 is however fungible, like money, so we never know which particular molecules are in the 12% flux this year or will be in 2013.
The IPCC’s TAR (Houghton et al 2001) and Houghton’s own book (2004) give clear accounts of the process I have just described, but it is mostly absent from the Nobel prize winners’ tosh in IPCC AR4 2007.
Sounds really good – but its wrong.
Read http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/researchers-publish-results-of-iron-ocean-fertilization-experiment/ about the diatoms in the sea – possibly the largest biomass in the world – as they die and sink taking carbon down with them – continually. Its where all those limestone rocks come from trccurtin. You did realize that those rocks are all diatom shells didn’t you? The diatoms took huge amounts of CO2 out of the early atmosphere to the detriment of plants. All these nice IPCC calculations based on false assumptions. Of course thanks to Henry’s law once the oceans start cooling the gassing off of CO2 will stop and more will dissolve and then Mauna Loa will cease its monotonic rise that is so unrepresentative of the rises and falls in the economies and the increases and decreases of burning of fossil fuels – but then spotting a half of one percent change in atmospheric CO2 is difficult.
The ‘carbon’ markets are just another way of taking money from the gullible who have been told to believe that warmer and more food is bad, and that colder with less food is good. The rate of warming out of the Little Ice Age has continued with some ups and downs. But we are at the coldest part of the Holocene. From the evidence so far extra CO2 in the atmosphere has done nothing but good. If you disagree show observational evidence to the contrary – not models real tangible evidence.
With the numbers of people dying of hunger already the last thing we need is a cold period even at the level of the 1970s.
Soos says:
July 20, 2012 at 2:03 am
Unfortunately, every argument you make also argues against your own position. We are forced, if we are being intellectually rigorous, to the conclusion shared by Lovelock, Dyson, Rutan and many others:
As you eloquently point out, trying to tease out a proof of AGW based on the temperature record is wishful thinking at its worst. There is no way you can argue that temperatures have done what James Hanson and the IPCC have predicted.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming..
Global WHAT?
Yeah, as if you can believe anything that emerges from the EU, especially data!!!!!
a jones says:
July 19, 2012 at 5:
So what?
Unless you believe in little green fairies in the bottom of the garden of course.
Kindest Regards
Now, if you go into any town/village hall, & encounter 100 people, & you ask them if faries do exist & live there, & 95 people vote yes, & the remaining 5 people say they’re not sure or no they don’t believe in faries, you have just proven by AGW logic by 95:5 that faries actually do exist & do live at the bottom of the garden! Simple science!
I wonder why China and India are still labelled “developing”. They are so industrialised now that they should be joining the “developed” world.
And plants world wide, continue to celebrate.
And I wonder what a plot of CO2 emissions per capita versus economic growth would look like…
The Mauna Loa measurement shows from 2010-2011 an increase from 389.78ppm to 391.57ppm and this is not equal to the increased by 3% last year. We should see about 401.47ppm.
Where did the ~10ppm go? In other words, from the 3% of CO2 produced only about 0.46% were added to the atmosphere.
Silly question: Did the plants destroyed it? If yes, then just plant more trees.
Actually, there was recently two thins published that the world got colder because of Christopher Columbus and Dschinghis Khan that caused cooling because trees too over farm land. Proof it!
Really funny – for Germany and the EU, likely same is true for the US, one might watch how millions, billons of $ are spent to feed the bureaucracy, useless green energy and all kind of non-sense to bring down CO2-emissions. Which in total are making up some 4 pct of the CO2-budget of the planet. As a side note one could see state budgets in the EU and the US “being not completely balanced…”
Makes China and India not so stupid after all to simply walk ahead without listening to much to beliefs brought forward by arrogant scientists/politicians. Its worth not a single life to not develop to achieve worthless CO2 targets.
Germany’s complete emissions, if all that was true and would matter, was the increase from 1990 to 2000.
If not for the scientific argument, the number should be a wake up call for Brussels, Berlin and Washington. Anybody there – need not to be too brainy.
Rgds from Germany
Anytime anything in China (or India) reaches a level PER CAPITA, it is a lot –> there are a heck of a lot of Chinese.
Soos says:
July 20, 2012 at 2:03 am
what’s to stop me simply fishing for a steeply positive trend over more recent temperature data
That is why I intentionally did not look at anything under 10 years. Note that three of the data sets had no warming over 15 years. With the error bars that you have shown such as 0.0 C +/- 0.2 C/decade, extra warming is just as likely as extra cooling so that proves little. By not mentioning error bars, I am just keeping up with Jones and if he says there has been no global warming for 15 years, that is good enough for me.
“The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research (HadCRUT) has long been the gold standard in climate data used by the IPCC, now a new analysis of the data by the UK Met Office shows there has been no global warming for the last 15 years.”
See
http://toryaardvark.com/2012/04/02/the-planet-has-not-warmed-in-15-years/
commieBob says:
Unfortunately, every argument you make also argues against your own position.
I’ve hopefully been careful enough to say the data are consistent with ongoing warming. They’re also consistent with cooling, with temperature stasis – i.e. by ignoring error bars we can frankly claim anything by carefully selecting the period we analyse. Refusing to look beyond a window of ~10 years means you’re doomed to not reliably find any warming if it’s there. It’s not very useful.
Maybe that’s why people like to focus on ten-year segments? 🙂
I should add that this is an easy trap to fall into, but also easy to climb out of with a little thought.
trying to tease out a proof of AGW based on the temperature record is wishful thinking at its worst.
I agree, it’d be foolish to look at AGW from a solely statistical perspective, fortunately we have a lot of physics too!
Werner Brozek says:
By not mentioning error bars, I am just keeping up with Jones and if he says there has been no global warming for 15 years, that is good enough for me.
I hope you see now how the quesiton posed to Prof Jones was quite loaded. It’s not something you can answer in a soundbite. The failure to reach statistical significance with 15 years’ data does not mean there was no global warming. As I mentioned upthread, the chances of detecting warming over even 15 years is only ~50/50. Not good odds. Had warming been significant, I’m pretty sure the interviewer would have asked ‘what about warming over the last 14 years?’ instead. Jones wasn’t ruling out warming, and since that interview the warming did become statistically significant. It just took more data for the trend to emerge from noise, as we’d expect.
Soos writes: “You can’t simply fish for the longest period in the data for a flat trend line.”
When smoothing the data shows obvious changes in slope, then it can be of interest to examine linear trends within those slope domains of the data. Year to year and month to month variations due to oscillations such as ENSO obscure longer term trends that smoothing will highlight, and which can be examined without fear of arbitrariness or ‘cherry picking’.
The NOAA dataset, for example:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201001-201012.gif
shows rising temperatures between about 1975 or so and about 2000. And the smoothed line is even responsive enough to show the effects of the eruptions of El Chichon (early 80s) and Pinatubo (early 90s). The current slump in warming is longer than either of those two and has been proceeding without the help of any major vulcanism, and in the face of unabated increases in CO2 concentrations.
Other major datasets show similar features, despite slight differences in methodology.
Something important, at least as important as CO2, is obviously going on here.
While Svensmark and Kirkby might not yet have enough experimental data to demonstrate unequivocally a strong solar role, theirs is the leading alternative hypothesis at present.
Soos: “I’ve hopefully been careful enough to say the data are consistent with ongoing warming. They’re also consistent with cooling, with temperature stasis – i.e. by ignoring error bars we can frankly claim anything by carefully selecting the period we analyse. Refusing to look beyond a window of ~10 years means you’re doomed to not reliably find any warming if it’s there. It’s not very useful.”
Indeed, you mentioned ‘consistent with’ in your very first post at 5:50. But this is one part Sophist equivocation and one part the Sophist Sorties paradox. For certainly if you agree with physics then you agree that the temperature of the universe as a whole is consistent with ongoing cooling, but not ongoing warming. But the question is not whether there is ongoing warming or cooling with in some constrained notion of time or space. It is a question of whether the data is consistent with any given theory. Specifically with reference, in this instance, to causality within that theory.
Which is a simple idea, you can either make correct predictions with that theory or not. But the record over the last ten years is consistent with any scenario of temperature change. So any theory that stated we would see a definite temperature change over the last 10 years is strictly falsified. If you disagree with this then certainly you accept that my theory of a global ice age is perfectly correct since I incorrectly predicted that Lake Erie would be covered with glaciers by now. Of course CO2 is the causal agent in my theory and so we had better curb CO2 production — right now, before we’re all doomed — because otherwise Lake Erie will have been covered in glaciers already. Obviously the entire notion is absurd, but that has been precisely the case with every theory of global warming, encoded as a formal logic in a computer model, that has predicted a definite warming signal over the last 10 years.
But that presumes there is a theory at all. For there any many inconsistent models of climate prediction that exist on various geographic and temporal scales that utilize CO2 as a causal agent. And it is certainly the case that numerous of these have falsified themselves by claiming that reality is not what reality is. And yet these same models are in current usage as ‘valid’ and ‘consistent’ so long as we average them all together and fail to make valid predictions. Though if they had included my model of CO2 caused global ice ages then the average of the models would not be at odds with measurements at all. And CO2 would still be the causal object. The point being that if there are numerous falsified theories of global warming then the adherence to CO2 as causal for all of them and that all of them are correct in aggregate is to state that global warming is a metaphysical commitment to CO2 and that there is, as yet, no theory of global warming. But if that’s the case then every theory of Theism is correct, even when they are obviously wrong, and so we should obviously take political steps to keep Atheism at bay. Lest calamity ensue. This too is absurd. But far from doing foul things with Karl Popper’s corpse it is simply Jonestown Koolaid Kult nonsense.
And this is not difficult. For if we commit to the metaphysical principle of CO2 being causal then the flat-ish temperatures in the face of increasing CO2 disprove this metaphysical commitment. That is, CO2 can simply not be causal unless you invent new physics to ‘make’ the metaphysical commitment true. Of course, if you state that the error bars for the measured increase in CO2 is within the error bars for your particular theory of CO2 as a causal model then that’s perfectly fine. But if that is the case then we can neither state that the current relation between temperature and CO2 is consistent *or* inconsistent. It is simply not testable. Which is only to say that global warming is either not science or is not science yet.
For we can hardly prove that CO2 is a causal factor unless a measurable change in CO2 is correlated in such a manner that it can be unequivocably said that it is causal to a measurable change in temperature. Of course this has yet to occur. And certainly you can defend the notion that we ought give credibility, and funding, to research that chases this metaphysical commitment on the basis that, even if gobsmackingly wrong, the models allow us to make useful predictions about regional temperatures. But that is to only deny that we can derive any knowledge from CO2 itself.
But even then, to the degree that such an argument is valid — and has been for such things as Newtonian mechanics — then it cannot be said that the commitment to CO2 makes useful predictions at differing scales either. For CO2 based models have error bars twice as large as a random walk when predicting regional effects. And in this case it is not simply an issue of falsified theories. It is a matter of being wrong *on purpose*. For if there were any potential for useful predictions then they would be no worse than random chance.
If you continue to hold and assert that these are not dispositive issues then certainly you agree that my theory that Lake Erie is currently under a glacier is correct because Lake Erie is currently not under a glacier. And that it is then proven by physics that CO2 is responsible for the ice age that will occur even though it hasn’t occurred. But since you agree you could be a pal and help convince the government to toss research funding my way. For we have desperate need to study how to avoid the ice age that didn’t happen. Also my food bill isn’t cheap.