Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Financial Times is disappointed that hitting the Paris targets is looking even less likely, thanks to economic growth driving a rise in CO2 emissions.
China recovery pushes greenhouse emissions to global record
NOVEMBER 13, 2017 Tobias Buck in Berlin and Lucy Hornby in Beijing
Paris targets under threat as forecast 2% rise follows three years of zero growth
NOVEMBER 13, 2017 Tobias Buck in Berlin and Lucy Hornby in Beijing 58 comments Stronger Chinese economic growth will push global greenhouse gas emissions to a record high in 2017 after remaining flat for three years, dashing tentative hopes of a turning point in the world’s efforts to curb climate change.
A new report by the Global Carbon Project, an international research consortium, predicts that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry will rise 2 per cent this year. The report was released at the UN climate change meeting in Bonn on Monday.
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“Emissions are following what countries have pledged — but what countries have pledged is nowhere near enough to meet the Paris objective,” said Glen Peters, co-author of the report and research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo.
This year’s rise is especially disappointing as it follows three years of almost no growth in emissions despite a world economy expanding at a steady clip. In 2016, emissions were flat even though the world economy grew 3.2 per cent. One explanation for the uptick is that China’s economic slowdown in the middle part of this decade was more pronounced than official figures suggested. The GPC report concludes: “The world has not reached peak emissions yet.”
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/ba4212b6-c63f-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675
The Carbon Project report is available here.
Remember all those wild green claims that economic growth had been “decoupled” from CO2 emissions? If the Financial Times authors are right, the whole decoupling thing was a mirage, caused by dodgy economic growth figures from the Chinese Government, who allegedly concealed the true magnitude of their country’s problems.
Now the global economy has finally turned a corner for real, King Coal is back – as always, the engine of global prosperity and rising living standards, especially for the world’s poorest.
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Would someone like to explain to me how global CO2 emissions are measured? Of course it’s impossible. The figures given are nothing but a guesstimate, and there is no way at all to measure natural emissions.
The emissions can be calculated by the sales numbers of fossil fuels. This is fairly exact.
No more subsidies for this quackery! EVER! There is ZERO excuse for depriving people of light and heat in the winter, especially since the forecast for Europe/Germany on Accuweather said ‘lots of snow and cold’. NO EXCUSE for it. This isn’t the Dark Ages.
The greenies would like it to be… 🙁
It is very good news that CO2 emissions are going up. That’s because a sustained fall or even a plateau in CO2 emissions would permit the argument that non-rising temperature was the result of CO2 emissions reductions. Hopefully the rate of CO2 emissions increase will stay up too, to completely destroy the argument. Not that the media take any notice when climate alarmists’ arguments are destroyed ..,,
Not if atmospheric concentrations continue to rise at record rates. (even alarmists won’t be able to get away with that one)…
+1
The utter failure will more evident
Sara, unfortunately as far as energy is concerned this IS the Dark Ages in the West. Instead of real, data-based science leading to sensible evidence-based energy policies, we have religious beliefs and voodoo economics driving virtue-signalling policies that are destroying our reliable, affordable baseload energy sources in favour of unreliable, intermittent energy sources. I could list a hundred essential manufacturing industries that will cease to exist in the West if we don’t stop this madness – e.g. having to import all our steel, copper, aluminium, nickel, etc. instead of smelting it ourselves, increasing costs and destroying employment, for what?
How is it ascertained definitively that this is due to humans? Seems to me that this must be a terrestrial cause more than humans, especially given that the last few years is flat, and now a projected 2% increase? We certainly didn’t have a global recession the last 3 years that led to less CO2 production, especially given we just had a significant El Nino in 2015/16 which should have produced the opposite, which would be more natural CO2 outgassing. And now with cooling Pacific oceans, that should see some uptake of atmospheric CO2. It just doesn’t add up to me, but then what do I know. Maybe I missed something.
Possibly there is a time lag between ocean temperature rise and outgassing. Plus the annual swinging.
yes, absolutely the CO2 is ‘human’
CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel has a different isotopic signature
But the plants still LUV it, don’t they griff.
Its all just FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS for them.
Been luvin’ that CO2 ever since it started lifting from the “just surviving” level of 250ppm
MUCH more needed though, wouldn’t you agree. !
Philosophically, your point is invalid. The emissions are not that easily attributable as the reason, as upwelling sea surf. temps also affect the result. It is like telling 180% of the atmospheric co2 increase is due to human emissions! Which probably kind of holds.
Nope, the same “isotopes” come from natural sources too (and nobody is measuring those) so that argument has long been a non-starter.
This one draws/begs the question as to define the signal seen at Mauna Loa and the signal calculated by adding up everyone’s consumption of coal, gas and oil.
Where is the connection between emissions and the amount (ppm) of CO2 recorded – where does the CO2 actually go?
But we are now finding out – it accumulates over Equatorial/tropical forests – OCO2 Sputnik tells us so.
Why does it go there, especially when at the same time we are told that the forest is growing faster because of it? It’s an even worse case of positive feedback than the originally posited GHGE
How do warmists explain it? Please. I really do want to know.
Also exactly how an alkali thing like ‘The Ocean’ is going to spontaneously give up (out-gas) and acidic thing like CO2? Utterly trashes Entropy and Le Chatelier.
Henry’s Law applies to fresh water = pH7 neutral water – not seawater at pH8.2
Then the height of the 254Kelvin isotherm is rising = increasing in area at 350,000,000 square metres annually. That is a heat loss – NOT heat trapping. Trapped heat would mean the isotherm would be falling.
Then some muppets recently here claimed that absorbing solar radiation in the atmosphere will have a greater heating effect that absorbing it on the ground. For the air yes, but the atmosphere can and does dump energy faster than a really fast thing. Does NOT warm the surface – another cooling effect.
Complete madness.
Also, the spectrum of the radiation leaping off that point is ‘flattened’ and ‘more diffuse’. Lower peaks within it.
THAT stacks up perfectly with GHGs not actually ‘trapping energy’ and or reflecting it to the surface but smashing the upwelling photons into more numerous but smaller, less energetic and colder photons scattered across the spectrum. Like the phosphor in a fluorescent tube.
Thus GHGs are speeding the descent of energy down the thermal gradient that exists between here and ‘outer space’. They are having a cooling effect – easily understood by their high molecular weight compared to oxygen and nitrogen.
THAT is why Al Gore features in the Fail Files here – his experiment MAY have had some trapped energy but its effect was swamped by the high thermal conductivity of the CO2.
As per 100’s of similar experiments out there on Utube
…. ‘that point’ being the 254K isotherm, average height 7,200 metres AMSL
Can we even measure CO2 emissions from “fossil fuels and industry” to within 2 percent?
We are measuring atmospheric CO2 Patrick. That is easily done accurately.
Industrial emissions are estimated from fuel consumed, industrial methods etc. Not so accurate, but accurate enough to draw conclusions.
the developed word paid its own way, installing fossil fuel power and using the wealth creates to clean up emissions. none of this had anything to do with co2.
now China and India are being paid to cleanup their emissions under the umbrella of co2. again nothing to do with co2. rather because the people of India and China don’t like dirty air. question. why the double standard?
Must be a bit of a surge of CO2 from Bonn as well.. 😉
https://youtu.be/hW2B_GT3b1E
‘Paris targets under threat as forecast 2% rise follows three years of zero growth,
If there has been three years of zero growth of CO2 in the atmosphere, then why is it that China are being blamed for the sudden increase. China has been building power stations and developing their industry for a number of years now, all of which must surely have had an effect on the gradual increase of CO2 over the last four years. So how do the ‘experts’ come up with their conclusions, and how do they know that China is the sole culprit? Surely India, Pakistan and other rapidly developing countries must have had some effect, not just over the last year but over the last four years..
We need to join the earth’s biosphere and celebrate when CO2 reaches 500 ppm! That would be a authentic “Earth Day”. Then only 500 -1000 ppm more to reach optimum levels.
Hear hear! If plants could protest, they’d have signs saying “CO2 – It’s what’s for dinner”!
Anti-prosperity, anti-human. Everything these guys force upon us basically amounts to ‘let them eat cake.’
And this is the high moral ground.