A woman wearing a face mask to protect herself from pollutants walks past office buildings shrouded with pollution haze in Beijing, Monday.
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“Reaching zero emissions will require long-term commitments from countries attending the climate meeting in Paris this week and beyond”, concluded Jackson.
One skeptical scientist offered a $10,000 bet that world emissions will keep rising despite the findings, which were published on the same day that Beijing issued its first ever red alert for smog, urging schools to close and invoking restrictions on factories and traffic.
Study in journal Nature Climate Change. We just need to better appreciate the true value of rainforests. But if we tell you that C02 drop this year, would you believe that? This, in particular, is important to note when setting limits on gas emissions.
Nuclear power has been “less successful” in cutting emissions due to a fall in global capacity, which is attributed to the phasing out of nuclear generators in Germany and Switzerland, and continued high cost.
NEW research shows the worldwide effort to slash carbon emissions is finally seeing some reward.
Lead researcher Prof Corinne Le Quere said the figures for the last two years contrasted with the growth trajectory since 2000 when emission rose by 2-3 per cent each year. “There is a long way to near zero emissions”. “But it’s still a mountain”. But if the downward trend continued into 2016, it would be incredibly exciting, he said. China’s emissions are likely to rise again, but the Chinese government has pledged to hit the peak by 2030.
Other co-authors of the report are Robbie Andrew, Jan Ivar Korsbakken and Glen Peters, Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (Norway); and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria).
Emissions in the U.S. have declined by 1.4 per cent annually over the last decade.
But he warned that India could be following the same high-growth, high-carbon path that China started down in the 1990s, when its emissions were less than a quarter of what they are today. Financial mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund have been established to help invest in renewable energy and more sustainable infrastructure in the developing world, but this may not be enough. Dr Canadell said all nations needed to be more ambitious and ramp up their emissions targets.
The drop in emissions surprised scientists and contrasted sharply to the accelerating growth of fossil fuel emissions, a key factor in global warming, in previous years.
India, the fourth largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is the wild card because of its enormous potential for energy-gobbling economic growth.
USA emissions in 2015 dropped by about 1.5 percent.
Harmful emissions of carbon dioxide would fall by 0.6 percent in 2015, breaking its recorded rapid growth in the past decade.
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“The global total should absolutely be going down after 2020”, Holdren says, “so what we are seeing now is a good sign and should not be regarded as cause for false hope, but cause for real hope that the world is turning this around”.
