Do recent emission trends imply higher emissions forever?
The rapid growth of CO2 emissions since 2000, at a rate of above 3% annually, has recently attracted considerable scientific and policy attention. Raupach et al. and Sheehan, for example, suggest that the rapid growth may indicate a trend reversal and thus postulate the beginning of a significant breakaway from the long-term historic trends of improving carbon and energy intensities, worldwide (new global growth path). This could imply a serious underestimation of future greenhouse gas emissions as projected, for example, by the IPCC SRES scenarios.
Emissions are expected to grow at an annual rate of about 1.4% to 3.4% between 2000 and 2010 in the SRES scenarios. However, the majority of the scenarios have lower growth rates than the observed trend of the recent years. This difference has led to concerns whether the scenarios are still up-to-date. Obviously, such a finding would be very important for climate policy, since it could mean that climate change impact assessments based on SRES are underestimated, just as the effort involved in stabilising greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.
In this article, we will briefly look into the question of whether there is indeed substantiated proof for a trend reversal hypothesis. On that basis, we will also discuss the potential implications of current emission trends for global climate policy.
Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- Do recent emission trends imply higher emissions forever?
- Publication date
- 19 July 2008
- Publication type
- Publication
- Magazine
- Climatic Change 91(3-4): 237-248
- Product number
- 92281