Study sees possible dip in world carbon dioxide emissions

Canadell said that despite global economic growth in 2015, worldwide emission from fossil fuels is expected to decline by 0.6 percent, the first decline since the global financial crisis in 2008.

“As the emerging economies are mostly based on coal, as they grow we are expecting a restart in the emissions”, study co-author Corinne Le Quere, of the University of East Anglia, told BBC News.

Dr Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, said economic growth was at around 3 per cent past year, whereas emissions fell by about 0.5 per cent.

“Most scenarios exceed the carbon budget for a 2°C warming target in the first half of this century, which then requires up to several billion tonnes of emissions to be removed from the atmosphere each year during the second half of the century”, said Dr Canadell.

The average annual growth in emissions over the last 15 years has been about 2 or 3 percent, the head of the study said in a statement.

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.

China accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, and the new figures reflect broad shifts in the Chinese economy that led to lower emissions growth in 2014, as well as a likelihood of declining emissions in 2015.

“The only time in the past when we have had a drop in emissions is when we had global recessions, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, so that is really quite remarkable and it gives us hope”, said David Reay, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

In the report published in Nature Climate Change, the authors highlight solar and wind power as particular successes, with the amount of wind power installed in 2014 the same as the entire world capacity a decade ago. Besides embracing a cap-and-trade system, which will put further downward pressure on coal, China announced it will use what is called “green dispatch” system for its electric grid. But almost 60 per cent of the increase in primary energy use in the last two years was met by renewable and nuclear power.

If we will only look more carefully on these verses of the Bible, it will appear that the solution to global warming will be very simple: listening to God and obeying His commands all over again.

David Runnalls, a senior fellow with Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation, said leaders in India are smart enough to avoid getting trapped in the same “coal mess” that led China to become the world’s largest emitter of Carbon dioxide with 27 per cent of global emissions.

“The trend of rapid global emissions growth has been broken”, said Michael Grubb at University College London. “I certainly think they will”, Le Quere says, because China’s economy is bound to revive.

“This agreement allows us to have more tools to make a difference when it comes to climate change, to learn from each other’s experiences”, Selinger said.

China’s changing tune on climate change can help build diplomatic goodwill too.

But officials said the decline is unlikely to stick even as the world continues its transition to cleaner energy. There is no time to lose and, with these great examples all over the world already proving the environmental and economic case, no more excuses for waiting.

But John Holdren, the science adviser to the White House, says whether the decline is a blip or more lasting, it suggests that a real decline in emissions is within reach.

It is important to take a deep breath, resist the urge to use one modest piece of good news as a trigger for environmentalist triumphalism, and start with a cavalcade of caveats.

The data also shows the United Kingdom was responsible for 1.2% of global emissions in 2014, experiencing a 9% drop in emissions that year.