Greenhouse gas emissions shock scientistsCarbon dioxide output is rising rather than falling, despite efforts to curb it. 'It's scary,' one researcher says.
From Times Wire Services
September 26, 2008
WASHINGTON -- The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.
The new numbers, which some scientists called "scary," were a surprise because experts thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output rose 3% from 2006 to 2007.
That amount exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.
Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up carbon dioxide, are doing so at lower rates, scientists said. If those trends continue, the world will be on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level.
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that an increase of between 3.2 and 9.7 degrees Fahrenheit could trigger massive environmental changes, including melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers and summer sea ice in the Arctic...
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..."We should be worried -- really worried," Moss told the Washington Post. "This is happening in the context of trying to reduce emissions."
The new data also shows that forests and oceans, which naturally take up much of the carbon dioxide humans emit, are having less impact. These "natural sinks" have absorbed 54% of carbon dioxide emissions released since 2000, a drop of 3 percentage points compared with the period between 1959 and 2000.
The pollution leader was China, followed by the United States, which past data show is the leader in emissions per person in carbon dioxide output. And although several developed countries slightly reduced output in 2007, the U.S. churned out more....
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...Emissions in the U.S. rose nearly 2% in 2007, after declining the previous year. The U.S. produced 1.75 billion tons of carbon.
"Things are happening very, very fast," Le Quere told the Associated Press. "It's scary..."
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..."If we're going to do something
, it's got to be different than what we're doing," he said...
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...Moreover, new scientific research suggests the globe is already destined for a greater worldwide temperature rise than predicted. Last month, two scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Diego published research showing that even if humans stopped generating greenhouse gases immediately, the world's average temperature would "most likely" increase by 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century.
Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, they based their calculations on the fact that new air-quality measures worldwide are reducing the amount of fine particles, or aerosols, in the atmosphere and diminishing their cooling effect.
What is "kind of scary" is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Under the panel's scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
If this trend continues for the century, we would be exceedingly lucky "for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic," said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-warming26-2008sep26,0,6690604.story
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