Climate: Will CO2 emissions drop in 2015?

 China, India and many developing nations are expected to increase their carbon emissions in the coming years.

But the experts with the Global Carbon Project said they did not consider that to be likely.

China burns an enormous amount of coal – creating an enormous amount of CO2. Still, he says, “we’ll need to do much more”.

“The projected decline (in emissions) is largely down to China’s decreased coal use, driven by its economic adjustment”, Le Quéré added.

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. “We will probably still maintain a lower growth rate of emissions for maybe years to come”, he said.

– This article is part of a series produced in partnership by the Toronto Star and Tides Canada to address a range of pressing climate issues in Canada leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, December 2015.

That’s the goods news; the bad is that the scientists do not believe a decline in carbon output can be sustained, meaning it’s far too early to predict an emissions peak. But if the downward trend continued into 2016, it would be incredibly exciting, he said.

Data suggests global emissions of carbon dioxide are likely to stall and even decline slightly this year, the BBC has reported.

In what could lift the mood of negotiators at the Paris climate summit, scientists have found that carbon emissions are set to decline this year.

Stanford University’s Ken Caldeira expressed even deeper caution: He offered to bet the authors $10,000 that emissions haven’t peaked yet, a bet the authors weren’t quite willing to take.

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, said the report showed it was possible for the world economy to grow while reducing emissions, but he said in order to stop temperatures rising, emissions need to peak and then be reduced to zero.

“China’s intensity target does lead to increased emissions… if it does not peak until 2030”, Levin said.

There are still more sideline announcements than reports of actual negotiation progress at the COP21 venue. “The hope is that the Paris agreement will drive such reductions by providing regular five-year cycles for increased ambition guided by a strong long-term goal”. If India’s development follows the same path as China’s, India’s emissions could eventually equal those of China.

The team notes in the published report that emissions from Western Europe and the US have also flattened out. Comparing their findings with results of widely used on-the-ground measurements and the best available models of plant responses to increasing CO2, Smith and colleagues concluded that current model estimates of plants’ ability to offset growing greenhouse gas emissions may be unrealistically optimistic. Given the close relationship between energy consumption and climate change, interventions in energy might be able to keep the world on the 2 degrees Celsius path.