Harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels made their biggest ever annual jump last year, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data released this week.
China led the way with a spike of 212 million tonnes of carbon last year over 2009, compared with 59 million tonnes more from the US and 48 million tonnes more from India in the same period.
“It’s big,” said Tom Boden, director of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Environmental Sciences Division at the department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
“Our data go back to 1751, even before the Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen a 500 million tonne carbon increase in a single year,” he said.
The 512 million tonne boost amounted to an almost 6 percent rise between 2009 and last year, going from 8.6 billion tonnes to 9.1 billion tonnes.
Large jumps in carbon emissions from burning coal and gas were visible in China, the US and India, the world’s top three polluters, according to the figures that were posted online this week by the Oak Ridge Lab.
Significant spikes were also seen in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Poland and Kazakhstan.
Some countries, like Switzerland, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, Spain, New Zealand and Pakistan, actually showed slight declines from 2009 to last year, but those nations were uncommon. Much of Europe showed a moderate uptick.
The pollution measurements could indicate economic recovery from the global recession of 2007-2008, Boden said.
“At least from an energy consumption standpoint, companies were back to manufacturing levels that rivaled pre-2008 levels and people were traveling again, so emissions from the transportation sector rivaled those of pre-2008,” he said.
However, the data also raised concerns about the health of the environment.
“This is very bad news,” said John Abraham, associate professor at the University of St Thomas School of Engineering in Minnesota. “These results show that it will be harder to make the tough cuts to emissions if we are to head off a climate crisis.”
The data are derived from UN statistics gathered from every country in the world about fossil fuel energy stockpiles, imports, exports and production, as well as energy data compiled by oil giant BP.
“If you know how much of a fuel is consumed and you know the oxidation rate and you know the carbon content of the fuel, you can derive the emission estimate, so it is a pretty straightforward algorithm as far as the calculation,” Boden said.
The US team has been calculating the data in the same way over the past two decades, so the hike last year was initially viewed with disbelief by Boden and some of his colleagues, he said.
“We were a bit shocked. Our first reaction was: ‘Gee, there must be some problems in the underlying energy data.’ Then, when we actually started to explore other data streams, like the population data, like GDP data, and when we started to look at the actual atmospheric data, all of it paints a consistent picture and we believe it,” he said.
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