We’ve already posted on how China is moving right along now as the big kahuna of CO2 emissions, now it seems there’s some despair over the inability to miss the imagined 2°C target set by wishful thinkers.
From CSIRO: The widening gap between present emissions and the two-degree target
Carbon dioxide emission reductions required to limit global warming to 2°C are becoming a receding goal based on new figures reported today in the latest Global Carbon Project (GCP) calculations published today in the advanced online edition of Nature Climate Change.
“A shift to a 2°C pathway requires an immediate, large, and sustained global mitigation effort,” GCP executive-director and CSIRO co-author of the paper, Dr Pep Canadell said.
Global CO2 emissions have increased by 58 per cent since 1990, rising 3 per cent in 2011, and 2.6 per cent in 2012. The most recent figure is estimated from a 3.3 per cent growth in global gross domestic product and a 0.7 per cent improvement in the carbon intensity of the economy.
Dr Canadell said the latest carbon dioxide emissions continue to track at the high end of a range of emission scenarios, expanding the gap between current trends and the course of mitigation needed to keep global warming below 2°C.
He said on-going international climate negotiations need to recognise and act upon the growing gap between the current pathway of global greenhouse emissions and the likely chance of holding the increase in global average temperature below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
The research, led by Dr Glen Peters from CICERO, Norway, compared recent carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion, cement production, and gas flaring with emission scenarios used to project climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“We need a sustained global CO2 mitigation rate of at least 3 per cent if global emissions are to peak before 2020 and follow an emission pathway that can keep the temperature increase below 2˚C,” Dr Peters said.
“Mitigation requires energy transition led by the largest emitters of China, the US, the European Union and India”.
He said that remaining below a 2°C rise above pre-industrial levels will require a commitment to technological, social and political innovations and an increasing need to rely on net negative emissions in future.
The Global Carbon Project, supported by CSIRO and the Australian Climate Change Science Program, generates annual emission summaries contributing to a process of informing policies and decisions on adaptation, mitigation, and their associated costs. The summaries are linked to long-term emission scenarios based on the degree of action taken to limit emissions.
This all so sad and terrifying isn’t it? /sarc
Meanwhile, the green-politics of many western nations will criple their economies, losing jobs and sending production overseas to Countries further east – who exhibit no such qualms about CO2 emissions.
Nett effect is that the CO2 just moves from (a) to (b) along with health and wealth – is that the type of “redistribution” these people want?
Mother Earth carries on spinning regardless (unless of course NatGeo has a say in it)
Andi
Will some-one tell these guys that the UK Met Office admits there has been no significant increase in temperature for the last SIXTEEN YEARS. i.e. there is a disconnect between CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures.
Let’s review –
US Emissions are flat or dropping.
China’s emissions growth is slowing and WHEN the building boom ends will drop.
China has 790 GW of coal fired plant running at 60% capacity which means about 1,8 Billion tons of coal for electricity generation. The other 2 billion tons of coal they use is for ‘industrial use’, mostly making cement and steel.
Building booms take a lot of cement and steel…but unlike increases in energy consumption, they always come to an end.(epecially in a country with a ‘one child’ policy.
“2˚C” reverse is “CO2”, disregarding subscript and superscript.
“Carbon dioxide emission reductions required to limit global warming to 2°C are a nonsensical goal based on junk science according to me as reported today in this comment.”
And now, back to Dr. Chicken Little and Dr. Peter Wolf of CICERO, for more news on the end of the world with their Mayan climate doom models.
Eventually the ‘greenies’ will realise that moving all the wealth and jobs from the West to China and India will do two things, move CO2 emissions out of their control because the Chinese and Indian governments and people won’t listen to them whine as much as we do, and more important, it will start to impact on their own family and friends economic and social well being. I also bet that there are a lot of scientists worried about bigger and bigger cuts to their funding as the public purse empties and soon enough the green funding will start to suffer as folk realise the truth that we’ve cut CO2 but it doesn’t mean a thing as China and India haven’t, yet we’ve had to economically suffer for it as they keep on growing, at our expense. Of course Al and his cronies will be alright they’ve made their money out of it all, enough for them to retire somewhere nice and warm no doubt, probably by the sea.
Another good cold winter should start the reality ball rolling…
‘“Mitigation requires energy transition led by the largest emitters of China, the US, the European Union and India”.’
So, the word “mitigation” now means reducing CO2 output? I thought there was another word for that. I thought mitigation was taking action against the rising sea levels and all such supposed results of rising CO2.
I wish it was 2C warmer where I live. Instead temperatures have dropped almost 1C in the last 5 years.
ok so figured it out – the 450 ppm scenario = 2 degC scenario requires a global emission of 18 billion tonnes if the models are to be believed. Coincidentally the world emitted this number in 1976 and I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Currently we are emitting approximately 30 billion tonnes per annum.
The big rider in this is whether any of these numbers – the model, calculations of current emissions etc can be believed.
“A shift to a 2°C pathway requires an immediate, large, and sustained global mitigation effort,” GCP executive-director and CSIRO co-author of the paper, Dr Pep Canadell said.
Demonstrably false.
We are on a 2°C (or less) pathway right now. No assinine mitigation effort necessary. At least, that is what the observations say. No accounting for the fanciful imaginations of the modelers.
Dont worry, when the greenie western economies collapse, so will china, after all whose going to buy all those chinese goods ?.
“Global CO2 emissions have increased by 58 per cent since 1990…”
For any scientist like me who has the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements at hand, it is obvious that the atmospheric CO2 level — which is more pertinent than dubiously estimated “CO2 emissions” — increased by only about 11% since 1990 (from 355 ppm to 393). Why should anyone with that knowledge even read any further than the above irrelevant, and criminally misleading, datum?
Well, the alarmists and carbon-stranglers are losing their battle to kill off our economies, but the globe’s notable lack of warming means that somewhere or other the battle not to warm by two degrees is at least at stalemate, if not starting to create a rout.
And the origin and invention of the catastrophic “Two Degrees” target.
From the German “Spiegel On Line”
“A Superstorm for Global Warming Research”;
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-catastrophe-a-superstorm-for-global-warming-research-a-686697-8.html
Part 8: The Invention of the Two-Degree Target
To quote;
Climate models involve some of the most demanding computations of any simulations, and only a handful of institutes worldwide have the necessary supercomputers. The computers must run at full capacity for months to work their way through the jungle of data produced by coupled differential equations.
All of this is much too complicated for politicians, who aren’t terribly interested in the details. They have little use for radiation budgets and ocean-atmosphere circulation models. Instead, they prefer simple targets.
For this reason a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.
It was a pretty audacious estimate. Nevertheless, the powers-that-be finally had a tangible number to work with. An amazing success story was about to begin.
‘Clearly a Political Goal’
Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, “life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible.”
But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”
Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.
“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. The idea didn’t hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany’s most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief scientific adviser — a position any researcher would envy.
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I hope my, canadian, govt takes note of this and further reduces any funding to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Climate Science branch.
1) I am sure it isn’t coincidence this is released in the same time frame as Doha.
2) It appears the only solution will be adaptation to what ever might happen in the future, since , according to this , the situation is basically hopeless. I am OK with that solution.
3) Is this an attempt to scare the world into action immediately? It has been said insanity is doing the same thing over & over & expecting a different result. Alarmist have tried to scare the world into their point of view, it has failed repeatedly and yet they persist with the same strategy. Insane!
harryw2,
The Chinese emission growth rate may slow down as labor cost goes up and in fact the Chinese projects the energy intensity of their economy will decrease allowing them to make some target. But then it is just the march of the heavy industries from UK and Europe to US, then US to Japan and Korea and recently from Japan to China and India. The next step would be march of those heavy industries to Myanmar, Malaysia, Vietnam. China in the next five years will commission some 273 GW of additional coal fired power plants ( see the Jan 2012 report of the National energy Technology Laboratory of the US department of energy). Cars, bridges, steel bars and other materials used in US and Europe are made in China. They will be made in India, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand soon. China might even start to import. The installed power plant capacity is normally 20 to 30 per cent higher than the average demand to meet the peak load and downtime of the existing power plants for maintenance.
Someone call me when plantlife use some gas other than CO2.
Hey Globalists: The Earf (and it’s driver, the Sun) have it. We will rather likely not ever get close to your little 2°C rise. No wailing or gnashing of teeth required, nor indulgences, nor massive taxes, reductions of liberty and lifestyle either. Relax and have a beer, I’ll gladly buy it for you.
harrywr2, the Chinese have a coming demographic crisis worse than that of Japan, the US, or Europe. They already have a surplus of ~30 mln adult males. By mid century, real population crash, analogous to Russia after the fall of the USSR. For now, people need to worry about what they’ll do with all those excess young men.
This is not a win or loose thing anyway it is simply some unreliable model predictions. I guess if one is prepared to believe in the supernatural as just about any theology imaginable they one is prepared to believe anything that anybody who appears to know what they are talking about says. That applies to a lot of people who haven’t a clue what they are talking about too.
But of course it’s not about 2 degrees C, or CO2. Its about transfer of money (as someone here said some time ago) “from the taxpayers of the first world to the ruling class of the third world,” and of course, power for UN bureaucrats.
If a technological breakthrough ( say cheap fusion power) suddenly made anthropogenic CO2 a non-argument, those assembled in Doha would quickly find a reason to oppose it. CO2 is an excuse for the above named actions, not the reason.
Yes, we may very well miss the 2 degree target. With PDO in the tank followed by AMO and a Sun going into a grand solar minima it is not unlikely that the temperature are going to drop bellow 2 C in coming decades.
I believe that starting up coal plant and burning more coal are not going to make much of a difference.
Dr Canadell said ‘the latest carbon dioxide emissions continue to track at the high end of a range of emission scenarios’ – meanwhile, temperatures continue to track below the LOW end of the range of emission scenarios. Another inconvenient truth for the warmists. Models falsified