Carbon emission growth to stall in 2015

According to a study from the University of East Anglia and the Global Carbon Project, emissions from burning fossil fuels could fall by as much as 0.6 percent this year, after it grew by only 0.6 percent last year. “Stabilisation, or reduction, in China’s coal use might be sustainable since more than half of the growth in the country’s energy consumption came from non-fossil fuel energy sources in 2014 and 2015”, Canadell said.

Dr Canadell said this would be a wake-up call for Australia’s mining industry, which has relied on coal exports to China to fuel the country’s energy needs. “But even if we reach peak global emissions within a decade or two, we’ll still be emitting massive amounts of Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels”. It is unlikely that emissions have peaked for good.

Past emissions declines have usually been linked to economic distress, such as the global financial panic of 2009 and the Russian economic meltdown of the late 1990s. Their central projection is a decline of 0.6 percent. Scientists say the drop is tangible evidence of changing behaviour as more countries invest in renewable energy such as solar and wind power.

“Current Earth system models assume that global plant growth will provide the tremendous benefit of offsetting a significant portion of humanity’s Carbon dioxide emissions, thus buying us much needed time to curb emissions”, said William Kolby Smith, one of the researchers, in a news release. Four sources of global carbon emissions in 2014 by 27 percent in China, 15 percent of United States, 10 percent of s AB and created in India with 7 percent, however, the per capita it looks at the carbon emission rate American coming year to 17.4 tons in particular.

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 trends in emissions are favourable, and countries have the opportunity to negotiate significantly higher levels of ambition to decouple economic growth from emissions.

Since 2000, global emissions have grown annually by 2-3%. According to Dr. Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, while there was an increase of 3 percent in the economic growth, there was a corresponding 0.5 percent drop in the greenhouse gas emissions. “Their emissions have gone down between 1 and 5 percent due to reduced coal consumption”, Glen Peters, senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environment Research, Oslo, Norway and a co-author of the new emissions study, told DW in Paris. Earlier this year, U.S. and United Nations scientists reported that Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per billion over most of the Northern Hemisphere, compared to about 280 ppm in the mid-18th century, before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reminded the more than 150 diplomats that the decisions they make this week will “reverberate down through the ages”.

Promising finding… Carbon emissions are projected to fall in 2015, and we have China to thank for it.

Ministers face key sticking points including finance for poor countries to cope with climate change, a long-term goal to bring greenhouse gas emissions to zero and a review and ratchet mechanism allowing countries to revisit their climate action plans and increase ambition.

China is the world’s largest producer of wind energy and past year, it installed 23GW of new wind capacity.