Record amount of emissions released in 2010: report

Chinese motorists make their way along a smog filled road in Hefei, east China’s Anhui province. The amount of global warming gases sent into the atmosphere made an unprecedented jump in 2010, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data on carbon dioxide emissions, with China being the biggest polluter. (HANDOUT PHOTO)

MARGARET MUNRO
Postmedia News

Humans pumped out 10 billion tonnes of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 after rebounding quickly from the global financial crisis two years ago, scientists report.

Researchers with the Global Carbon Project say emissions climbed 5.9 per cent in 2010 to hit 10 billion tonnes. That is a whopping 49 per cent increase over 1990 — even though Canada and other countries pledged to cut emissions as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

“Taking action to reverse current trends is urgent,” says Corinne Le Quere, director of Britain’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Le Quere co-authored the report, which was published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Global CO2 emissions since 2000 are tracking the high end of the projections used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which far exceed two degrees warming by 2100,” Le Quere said in a release issued with the report. “Yet governments have pledged to keep warming below two degrees to avoid the most dangerous aspects of climate change, such as widespread water stress and sea level rise, and increases in extreme climatic events.”

The report is based on preliminary estimates of global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement production for 2010.

It says there was a short-lived drop in global emissions due to the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, but the CO2 emissions quickly climbed in 2010.

The rebound may have been tied to government investments to promote a speedy economic recovery and to high growth rates in emerging economies such as China and India, according to the research led by Glen Peters, at Norway’s Center for International Climate and Environmental Research.

“Many saw the global financial crisis as an opportunity to move the global economy away from persistent and high emissions growth, but the return to emissions growth in 2010 suggests the opportunity was not exploited,” Peters said in a statement.

He and his colleagues say total global emissions — which combine fossil fuel combustion, cement production, deforestation and other land use emissions — reached 10 billion tonnes of carbon in 2010 for the first time.

They say fossil fuel emissions rose 3.1 per cent each year between 2000 and 2010 — three times the rate of increase during the 1990s. They project emissions will increase 3.1 per cent in 2011.

The researchers estimate half of the emissions released remain in the atmosphere, where CO2 concentrations have reached 389.6 parts per million. Oceans, plants and trees soak up the rest of the emissions.

China, the United States, India, the Russian Federation and the European Union were the largest contributors to global emissions growth in 2010, the report says.

In 2009, Canada emitted 690 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which makes Canadians among the highest per capita emitters on the planet. Canada agreed to cut emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012 as part of the Kyoto Protocol, but Canada’s emissions are now 17 per cent above 1990 levels, largely because of increased emissions related to the extraction from the Alberta’s oilsands

“Kyoto is the past,” Canada’s Environment Minister Peter Kent told reporters in Ottawa last week as another round of climate talks began in South Africa.

Kent has been deflecting questions on whether Canada will formally pull out of the Kyoto accord at the UN-led meetings.