The world is going through the greatest economic cri­sis since the Great De­pr­ession — people are joble­ss in America with recession at its peak. But amidst this crisis what’s worst for our climate is that as per a team of researchers under the umbrella of the “Global Carbon Project”, CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels increased by two per cent from 2007 to 2008 (i.e. in the heart of the crisis), by 29 per cent between 2000 and 2008 and by an astonishing 41 per cent between 1990 and 2008 -the reference year of the Kyoto Pro­tocol.

The two per cent increase during the period of financial crisis goes against the changes in emissions for 2009, which were expected to fall to their 2007 levels, before increasing again in 2010 as per models based upon the projected changes in GDP.

Lead author on the paper that appeared in the Nature Geoscience journal, Professor Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Antarctic Survey said, “The only way to control climate change is through a drastic reduction in global CO2 emissions.”

Not only are the emissions increasing but there is also evidence that the CO2 carbon sinks of oceans and biomass are somewhat saturating. On this the Global Carbon Project found that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that rem­ained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent that means the rest of the emissions were abs­orbed by the Earth’s carbon sinks on biomass and in the oceans. During this time, this fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease in the efficiency of the natural si­nks. Thus, there is evidence that the sinks are responding to climate ch­ange and variability, but in ad­verse ways by decreasing CO2 ab­sorptions.

Also, back on emissions, a comparison of the CO2 emissions in the last decade i.e. 1990 – 2000 and the subsequent period of 2000 – 2008 revealed that the emissions have increased at the average annual rate of 3.4 per cent in 2000 – 2008 period. This is much higher than the one per cent average annual rate seen in the previous decade.

Further, as per the study, emissions from the land use and deforestation accounted for 12 per cent of total emissions in 2008 from a 20 per cent of total emissions in 2000. Thus, the proportion of emi­ssions due to land use and defores­tation has hardly increased over the last eight years. Although, this pi­ece of news might appear as pr­omising, but as per the Global Ca­rbon project, the bad news is th­at the emissions from coal are now the dominant fossil fuel emission so­urce, crossing the previous 40 years of oil emission dominance.

And where do India and China stand as growing economies on the emissions increases? It turns out that emissions from emerging economies such as China and India have more than doubled since 1990 and developing countries now emit more greenhouse gases than developed countries as a whole. Upon investigation of reasons for the increase in emissions in developing countries like India, it was found that a quarter of the growth in CO2 emissions in developing countries, including India, could be attributed to an increase in international trade of goods and services over the past few years in these economies.

The researchers in their paper argue for more research that is ur­gently needed to accurately predict from our current climate models, the changes and variability in the me­chanisms of natural CO2 abs­orptions by oceans and biomass. Le Quéré says, “The Earth's carbon sinks are complex and there are some gaps in our understanding, particularly in our ability to link human-induced CO2 emissions to atmospheric CO2 concentrations on a year-to-year basis. But, if we can reduce the uncertainty about the carbon sinks, our data could be used to verify the effectiveness of climate mitigations policies.”

Earlier in 2007, the Intergo­vernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had proposed a “four box” model for the natural processing of atmospheric CO2 by our carbon sinks. The sinks have a major influence on climate change and are important in unders­tanding the link between anthropo­genic CO2 emissions and atmosp­heric CO2 concentration.

In this light, knowing how much CO2 is present in atmosphere minus how much is removed every year due to natural process absorptions each year, allows one to estimate the ne­eded caps on the CO2 emissions for the future years more accurately. But so far scientists have not be­en able to calculate the CO2 upt­ake of the sinks with sufficient acc­uracy to explain all the annual cha­nges in atmospheric CO2 concentration, which hinders the scienti­sts’ ability to monitor the effectiveness of CO2 mitigations policies.

The writer is a doctoral scholar, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA and also knowledge editor, Financial Chronicle, New Delhi