The world continued to increase the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide it pumped into the atmosphere during 2019, but not as fast as in the previous couple years.
A surprise drop in coal use in the United States and Europe helped to slow the growth of global carbon dioxide emissions this year, with softening demand in China and India also contributing, according to a study published today.
The report, launched at the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP25) climate summit in the Spanish capital, Madrid, showed that growing appetite for oil and gas meant the world was still far from achieving the drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed to avert catastrophic global warming.
Reuters Newsagency reports nevertheless, coal use fell sharply in the US and Europe, helping slow the projected growth in carbon dioxide emissions to 0.6 per cent in 2019 compared with 2.1 per cent the previous year.
Led by big jumps from China and India, the world is projected to spew 36.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the air in 2019.
Two scientific studies by Global Carbon Project, a group of international scientists who track emissions, show that’s up nearly 231 million tonnes from 2018, according to the studies in Environmental Research Letters.
Reuters reports slower growth in demand in China, which burns half the world’s coal, and India, combined with overall weaker economic growth, also helped slow the upward march of emissions, said the report, known as the Global Carbon Budget 2019.
“The weak growth in carbon dioxide emissions in 2019 is due to an unexpected decline in global coal use, but this drop is insufficient to overcome the robust growth in natural gas and oil consumption,” said Dr Glen Peters, research director at Oslo-based climate research centre CICERO.
Dr Peters added that global carbon dioxide (C02) emissions from fossil fuels were likely to be more than four per cent higher in 2019 than in 2015, the year when the UN sponsored Paris Agreement to tackle climate change was adopted.
Published by the Global Carbon Project research group in several academic journals, including Nature Climate Change, the report represents the first full-year estimate of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions in 2019.
The authors said that recent growth in renewable energy and electric vehicles had served, at best, to merely slow the growth in fossil fuel emissions, which must fall rapidly if the world is to meet temperature goals in the Paris Agreement.
The study also estimated that emissions from forest fires and other land-use changes rose in 2019 to six billion tonnes of CO2, about 0.8 billion tonnes more than the previous year, driven partly by fires in the Amazon and Indonesia.
Dr Joeri Rogelj, a lecturer in climate change at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, downplayed the long-term significance of annual fluctuations in emissions growth.
“The small slowdown this year is really nothing to be overly enthusiastic about,” Dr Rogelj said.
“If no structural change underlies this slowdown than science tells us that emissions will simply gradually continue to increase on average.”
“Emissions grew more slowly than last year but we still set a global record. It’s hard to be upbeat about that,” said study co-author Professor Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist.
“I don’t think we have completely seen the end of coal yet, but it is certainly in the death throes,” Dr Peters said.
“Though, I would imagine a slow and protracted decline of coal because of the young infrastructure in Asia.”
EcoNews is an independent publication that relies on contributions from its readers.
WE’RE BUILDING A PLATFORM WITH A CLEAR FOCUS ON THE ENVIRONMENT, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL GOOD. CONTRIBUTE AND TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE AN IMPACT.
