Growth Rate Of Global CO2 Emissions Since 2000 Already Beyond IPCC Worst-Case Scenario - NAS

[hatrack]

Worldwide CO2 emissions rose at a faster rate in 2000-2004 than the worst-case scenario imagined in this year's UN reports on climate, according to new research. The rise over the first four years of this century is also greater than in the 1990s - 3.1% a year between 2000-2004, up from an average of 1.1% a year during the 1990s.

This is faster than scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggesting even its most alarming predictions of the effects of climate change may not tell the whole story.

In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists said the accelerating growth rate was largely due to the increasing energy intensity of economic activity, with growing populations and economies also having an impact.
The research noted a reversal of the trend towards greater energy efficiency and lower carbon working seen in the 1990s.

"The trends relating energy to economic growth are definitely headed in the wrong direction," said Chris Field, one of the authors of the report and director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. "Despite the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are affecting the world's climate, we are not seeing evidence of progress in managing those emissions in either the developed or developing countries. In many parts of the world, we are going backwards."

EDIT

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2085595,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Your nominations would be appreciated.

[phantom power]

1. Of course they did.

:banghead:

[GliderGuider]

2. "Faster than predicted"?

Again? For the thousandth time this year? Who could have predicted that?

CO2 is going up faster than we thought, and the Southern Ocean is already full. I'm a fast-crash doomer, but this stuff is starting to make me feel like a wild-eyed optimist.

[watrwefitinfor]

4. "I'm a fast-crash doomer"

I didn't know there was a name for us.

It's a club I don't enjoy being a member of.

Wat

[phantom power]

5. We should have a band. The Fast Crash Doomers.

[phantom power]

3. The buffers have saturated. Fucking hell.

[Gregorian]

6. And I do not think we will be "engineering" our way ouf of it.

For a standard producing oil well platform, it would take over 500 of these to replace it.


The amount of energy required to construct a car is approximately 10% of the fuel it will use in it's lifetime.

It's the population. Period. And it's going to get ugly fast, as two billion people turn on the lights and hot water.

A very quick google yields websites like this one that agree with these numbers.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Research.html

[YankeyMCC]

7. dammit

[july302001]

8. Thank you hatrack for your work

I am sorry to hear this but the Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. is a very respected source. Thank you hatrack for this alert.

[NNadir]

9. Here! Here! Seconded.