While carbon dioxide emissions have slowed during times of economic recession, this would be the first decline during a period of strong global economic growth, researchers said.
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“Present World system models presume that global plant growth will supply the great advantage of canceling a substantial piece of mankind’s Carbon dioxide emissions, so purchasing us much needed time to control emissions”, Smith explained in a press release.
Climate scientist Corinne Le Quere from the University of East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, says there’s one main reason for the good news: “It’s mostly down to China’s use of coal”, she says.
In 2015, however, the researchers expect global carbon emissions to decline by 0.6 percent to 35.7 gigatonnes – their central projection from a range of -1.6 percent to +0.5 percent. Even more unexpectedly, emissions are projected to decline slightly in 2015 with continuation of global economic growth above 3% in Gross Domestic Product.
The new figures were released at the climate conference here by the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration that studies emissions, and published simultaneously in the journal Nature Climate Change.
And second, if fossil fuel emissions were held constant for the next 10 years and then reduced linearly to a level equal to 20 per cent of 2014 emissions by 2050 before further linear reduction to zero by 2100, WHRC said in a statement accompanying the study. But almost 60 percent of the increase in primary energy use in the last two years was met by renewable and nuclear power.
The researchers conclude, “Whether the unexpectedly low growth rates in Carbon dioxide emissions observed in 2014 and 2015 are a first sign of an approaching global peak in emissions is unclear”.
In 2013, the panel reported a slowdown or “hiatus” in warming since about 1998, despite rising man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, heartening sceptics who said the risks of climate change had been exaggerated.
China was the largest emitter globally with 9.7 billion tonnes, followed by the USA with 5.6 billion tonnes, the European Union with 3.4, and India, emitting 2.6 billion tonnes.
The unexpected dip could either be a temporary blip or true hope that the world is about to turn the corner on carbon pollution as climate talks continue in Paris, said the study’s authors, a scientific team that regularly tracks heat-trapping pollution. The U.S. has argued that GHG emissions cuts should not be legally binding; perhaps a pragmatic position due to the fact that legally binding emissions cuts could require the U.S. submit the agreement for approval by the U.S. Senate, which would likely reject any such proposal.
“Global emissions need to decrease to near zero to achieve climate stabilisation”.
Along with the decreased use of coal, the report pointed to the increasing use of renewables as a key to continuing to address worldwide emissions.
The decline of 0.6 percent projected for this year, should it come to pass, would be highly unusual at a time when the global economy is growing.
He said it shows emissions can stop growing even as the economy continues to grow. China’s plans don’t have the country hitting carbon dioxide peak emissions until 2030, which is 15 years from now.
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All three of the states National Grid serves, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, have established goals of 80 percent reductions in emissions economy-wide versus 1990 levels.
