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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Of course China’s output is partially (or mostly) the result of producing goods for everyone else.
A word to the wise : never use colors in a graph to exhibit information : upwards of 10% of the male population is color blind.
More extremly accurate nonsense. Worldwide and North American reported CO2 emissions by Man are depicited here. Bu tMan is a tieny contributor to atmospheric CO2.
Butnow here is the est of the story. Mankinds emissions are around 3% of the total CO2 emissions. The other 97% is produced by Nature. Some areas such as the Western hemisphere continents do a much better job absorbing and sequestering CO2 emissions. In North America there issi an extremley efficient set of CO2 biosequestration effects,set in place by both Man and Nature. The continent is comparatively very unpopulated and there are lots of farmland, ranchland and productive woodlands to absorb CO2. In North America much of thre forests arre managed and then hrvested for lumber and paper and then replanted. So there is always young growing trees which absorb lots of CO2. Ditto for the farmlands. Growing plants absorb lots of CO2. Other lands unsuitable to farming or silviculture are use for ranchlands and grazing animals crop the grasses and stimulate regrowth.
As a result scientific studies reveal that ALL the CO2 produced in North America is sequestered there annually, and the some more besides. Scientists working at Princeton monitored the Air with its CO2 blowing in from the Pacific on prevailing winds and measured it CO2 content as is moved across the country toward the Atlantic. They proved that North America is a Net CARBON SINK, absorbing all its CO2 flux, produced by Man or Nature.
South Americais also a Net CARBON SINK but for a different reason. It has the largest un-managed rain forest in the World, sufficient to sequester all the CO2 produced there by Man or Nature. The margin is not as large as in North America because Amazonia is largely a repalcement un-managed rain forest. So it is not composed of rapidly growing young replacement trees. It is composed of mostly mature growth so-called “old growth” as consumes little new CO2, but Amazonia is so large that it more than suffices.
Even if CO2 were a problem, which I do not scientifically concede any longer, the Western Hemisphere and its peopless have no work to do, as it is finished. Eurasia and Africa may still have some work to do with CO2 if you beleive that it is a problem, as these continents are net CARBON SOURCES.
Soos says:
July 20, 2012 at 10:13 am
I hope you see now how the question posed to Prof Jones was quite loaded.
You are talking about the quote from Feb. 13, 2010 when he said the warming was 0.12 C/decade but that this was not significant at the 95% level. I agree this was loaded. But the later quote that I referred to two years later was a simple statement of fact where the warming was indeed 0 over 15 years, ignoring error bars.
Maus, you wrote:
For the sake of the argument assuming that is true, is there a theory that stated such a thing? What theory would that be proposed where and by whom?
Maus, you also wrote:
1. The causal relationship between CO2 and temperature is not “metaphysical”. It’s based on tested theory in physics.
2. Your claim about the “flat-ish” temperatures over a 10-year interval falsify the causal relationship is nonsense. No one claims a linear relationship between CO2 and measured temperature, or that CO2 was the only factor causing temperature variability or that is was the dominant factor of the temperature variability on all time scales.
The theory that is allegedly falsified is only a figment of your imagination, but not what is said by mainstream climate science.
@Werner Brozek:
I don’t quite understand what your argument is and what you are trying to prove with your graphs about the temperature trend for the last 15 years and shorter.
So what if it doesn’t take 15 years, but 17 years or 20 years until the global warming trend becomes statististically significant with 95% probability. Is the conclusion from this supposed to be that there wan’t any global warming trend? Or what if the trend isn’t statistically significant with 95% probability yet, but it is with 90% probability. Is the conclusion from this supposed to be that there wasn’t any global warming trend?
How is it going to be in 50, 100 or 200 years from now? If the globally averaged temperature anomaly has continued to rise over the decades and centuries, are you still going to point to the then most recent 15 years that there wasn’t any global warming over such a time scale and shorter? You still will find such periods also in the future, despite the long-term warming trend, because on such short time-scales the variability of the global temperature anomaly is dominated by natural factors, like ENSO or the 11-year solar cycle.
Quite a number of the comments here repeat the meme how there hasn’t been any global warming over some recent time period, suggesting or saying this would contradict the statements of mainstream climate science about the man-made global warming trend. There is a nice illustration with respect to this meme:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
Perlwitz: SkS is a totally unreliable source. Just check out Grigg and Harries, possibly the most prolific analysts of outgoing longwave radiation. Their 2007 JoC paper Comparison of Spectrally Resolved Outgoing Longwave Radiation over the Tropical Pacific between 1970 and 2003 Using IRIS, IMG, and AIRS, in the actual data in their Tables A1 and A5 show temperatures by altitude in 1970 and 2003, with absolutely ZERO change, the trends and levels are BOTH identical and indistinguishable using Excel (which is beyond them in their actual text, with their snouts in the grants pudding).
Jan P Perlwitz says:
July 21, 2012 at 12:41 am
I am sure you are aware of the ‘travesty’ comment by Trenberth. My interpretation is that privately, they were shocked to see a period of 10 years with no warming. But when that actually happened. they said it appeared in 1 out of 8 model runs. Fair enough. I will accept that. However I also read that no model runs showed 15 years of no warming. Now that three of the data sets show over 15 years of no warming, Santer says we need 17 years for something or other. I am not sure if he is implying that 17 years of no warming means that CAGW is false. But if that happened, I would not be surprised if the goal posts get shifted again.
So what am I trying to prove? We are beyond Trenberth’s ‘travesty’ in terms of time of no warming and are rapidly approaching Santer’s 17 years. With 15 years and 7 months on RSS, we are 92% of the way there.
Is the conclusion from this supposed to be that there wasn’t any global warming trend?
If we did get to 17 years of no warming, I would NOT say that there wasn’t any global warming trend, but I WOULD say the warming is NOT at catastrophic rates, implying there is nothing we need to do about it.
Werner Brozek says:
“If we did get to 17 years of no warming, I would NOT say that there wasn’t any global warming trend, but I WOULD say the warming is NOT at catastrophic rates, implying there is nothing we need to do about it.”
Exactly right. The climate alarmist crowd [AKA: “mainstream climate science”] regularly attempts to corner scientific skeptics into the false position that there has not been any global warming. That is a misrepresentation. There has been natural global warming since the LIA. However, CO2 has nothing measurable to do with it. This can be easily proved:
By looking at the global warming trend within the long term parameters within which the rise in global warming is occurring, we see that there has been no recent acceleration of the warming trend. Since temperatures have not broken out above their long term parameters, the only logical conclusion is that the effect of CO2 on temperature is simply too small to measure. The long term trend remains unchanged. The rise in temperature since the LIA is not accelerating. The effect may exist, but it is insignificant. Therefore, any minuscule effect from CO2 can be disregarded for all practical purposes.
The gradually declining long term trend line [the green line] shows that temperatures are not accelerating. The rise in global temperatures has not deviated from its long term trend line since the end of the LIA, when CO2 was at ≈280 ppmv. CO2 is now at ≈392 ppmv. But that ≈40% rise in CO2 has not caused an acceleration of the gradual warming trend. Thus the rise in CO2 is likely an effect of warming, not the cause.
Finally, there is far too much misuse of the term “theory” when discussing what is simply an evidence-free conjecture. CO2=CAGW is only a baseless conjecture, with no empirical, testable supporting evidence. It is not, and never was, a “theory”.
Perlwitz;
You, like, totally don’t got no clue about the significance of 90 and 95% significance. It means the circumstances in question could happen by chance once in 10 or 20 times. Regardless of how low your personal scientific (or non-scientific “climatological”) standards are, those are NOT adequate odds on which to base drastic economic decisions virtually certain to inflict global penury.
RE: Main Article
“Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming …”
I think this is an example the false perception of the role of CO2. I believe it has been documented that that most of the ‘Greenhouse Effect’ warming is due to water vapor in the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_vapor