Tiempo Climate Newswatch

According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (MNP), "China's 2006 carbon dioxide emissions surpassed those of the United States by eight per cent... With this, China tops the list of carbon dioxide-emitting countries for the first time." The primary cause is accelerating coal demand for power generation and increasing cement production. The slowdown in the United States economy resulted in a slight drop in emissions during 2006.

It is past, not current, emissions that matter, commented Jay Apt at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the United States. "The United States will have the lion's share of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the foreseeable future. In fact, even if China's exponential growth continues, China will not surpass the United States in the numbers of carbon dioxide atoms in the atmosphere, that is concentration, until at least 2050," he said. "The rest of the world with the help of China needs to find ways for China to reduce carbon dioxide emissions," concludes Faith Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. Per head of population, China's contribution remains low, at about a quarter that of the United States.

"Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures," predicts a report authored by James Hansen at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and collaborators. "Civilization developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end," the scientists warn.

The concern is that global warming could generate a "flip" in the climate sparking a "cataclysm" in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. As a result, sea levels could rise by several metres by the end of the present century. This estimate contrasts with the recent projection of a maximum rise of around half a metre by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The new assessment is based on climate modelling, satellite date and more than 400,000 years of ice-core records that suggest that rapid climate change has occurred in the past when the planet heated up and ice sheets began to melt.

Investment in renewable energies reached a record US$100 billion in 2006, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "One of the new and fundamental messages of this report is that renewable energies are no longer subject to the vagaries of rising and falling oil prices - they are becoming generating systems of choice for increasing numbers of power companies, communities and countries irrespective of the costs of fossil fuels," said UNEP head Achim Steiner.

A low-carbon economy means that the world must embrace nuclear power, implemented hand in hand with other technologies, according to the World Energy Council (WEC). "If we are going to get through this century we had better assure ourselves that nuclear power is available for our coming generations," said Kurt Yeager, author of a recent WEC report on energy and climate change. Renewables have a role to play but would not, in most cases, be deployed quickly enough, the report concludes. The WEC proposes a three-phase strategy to tackle climate change: a global agreement to cut emissions by 2015, action up to 2030 to stabilize emissions and, finally, efforts to bring them down to current levels by 2050.