CO2 Emissions RiseAt Four Times Pace of the 1990s

Carbon dioxide emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, four times the rate of growth in the 1990s, according to a leading researcher. The rapid increase, due in part to the growing combustion of coal by China and India, “is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” considered in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Field said that no part of the world had seen a decline in emissions this decade and warned that “the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious” than predictions in the IPCC report. A major threat, he said, is that unfettered CO2 emissions and rising temperatures will release hundreds of billions of tons of methane and carbon dioxide stored in melting permafrost. Another researcher told the AAAS meeting that sea levels are also rising faster than expected, increasing in parts of the globe by four-tenths of an inch per year. The pace of global warming is rapidly outstripping many of the forecasts in the latest IPCC report.