
Carbon dioxide emissions reached a new record high in 2019, according to the latest figures from the Global Carbon Project, raising concerns about the ability of large emitters to effectively address the climate crisis.
The new data was unveiled during a press conference at the COP25 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid Wednesday. It shows that carbon dioxide emissions rose more slowly between 2018 and 2019 than they did between the previous two years, but humans are still expected to release 40.57 billion tons (36.8 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this year, the Associated Press reported. That's the equivalent of 2.57 million pounds of carbon dioxide, or two Airbus A380s, every second.
Yet another year, global CO2 emissions to increase in 2019. https://t.co/lC89Di23XP Our Global Carbon Budget 2019… https://t.co/OgL4W8b0fr— Pep Canadell (@Pep Canadell)1575423355.0
"Every year that emissions go up, even if it's just a small amount, makes the task of bringing them back down that much harder," Glen Peters, research director at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Norway and study contributor, told The New York Times.
Emissions are expected to rise 0.6 percent in 2019, according to the data published in Environmental Research Letters, Nature Climate Change and Earth System Science Data. That is significantly less than the 1.5 percent increase in 2017 and the 2.1 percent increase in 2018. However, a UN study released last month found that emissions need to decline 7.6 percent every year for the next decade in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
While the 2019 figures are an estimate based on six to ten months of data, Peters told the Associated Press that past estimates have proved more or less accurate.
The 2019 projections show coal emissions dropping by almost one percent, but oil emissions rising 0.9 percent and emissions from natural gas, which has driven more than 50 percent of emissions growth since 2012, rising by 2.6 percent. The rise in fracking has made gas the No. 1 electricity source in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
"Compared to coal, natural gas is a cleaner fossil fuel, but unabated natural gas use merely cooks the planet more slowly than coal," Peters told BBC News.
We project global coal, oil, & gas emissions for 2019 * Natural gas up 2.6% [+1.3% to +3.9%], driving >50% of growt… https://t.co/cnreKjnup8— Glen Peters (@Glen Peters)1575440818.0
Of the top four carbon dioxide emitters, the EU and the U.S. saw emissions fall by 1.7 percent, while emissions rose by 1.8 percent in India and 2.6 percent in China. Emissions in the latter two countries rose more slowly than expected due to slow economic growth. India especially was a surprise, since emissions there rose by eight percent in 2018, according to The New York Times. The economic slowdown in India and China helped account for the overall decline in coal use.
"Through most of 2019 it was looking as if coal use would grow globally, but weaker than expected economic performance in China and India, and a record hydropower year in India - caused by a strong monsoon - quickly changed the prospects for growth in coal use," Robbie Andrew, another Cicero researcher who was involved in the study, told BBC News.
The top six emitters in 2018 covered 67% of global emissions * China 28% * United States 15% * EU28 9% * India 7% *… https://t.co/YTWTl0Ns3h— Glen Peters (@Glen Peters)1575440825.0
The decline in U.S. emissions comes despite the pro-fossil fuel policies of President Donald Trump, but does not cancel out the country's 2018 emissions increase of 2.8 percent, The New York Times pointed out.
Overall, U.S. emissions have declined 9.7 percent between 2000 and 2018, the Associated Press reported, but 11 countries have achieved steeper declines this century. For example, the UK cut emissions by one third during the same time period.
"The numbers show that the U.S. is not leading in terms of overall emissions reductions and this proves that we could be doing better," University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck told the Associated Press. "This highlights that more, not less, U.S. international leadership is urgently needed. I'm still hopeful we can turn this all around... If we don't, the planet is cooked."
However, the U.S. isn't the only country that needs to improve. The overall data shows that climate policies matter, and no country's policies so far are ambitious enough.
"I do think global and national policies are making a difference, particularly by driving the rapid growth in renewables, and we'd be worse off without them," Rob Jackson, an earth system science professor at Stanford University who was involved with the research, told The New York Times. "But at the same time, it's clear those policies haven't been enough to stop the growth in fossil fuels."
The Global Carbon Budget 2019 just out. Another extraordinary effort of the global carbon cycle research community.… https://t.co/K2hTEk6dR6— GlobalCarbonProject (@GlobalCarbonProject)1575419489.0
A tornado tore through a city north of Birmingham, Alabama, Monday night, killing one person and injuring at least 30.
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By David Konisky
On his first day in office President Joe Biden started signing executive orders to reverse Trump administration policies. One sweeping directive calls for stronger action to protect public health and the environment and hold polluters accountable, including those who "disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities."
Michael S. Regan, President Biden's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, grew up near a coal-burning power plant in North Carolina and has pledged to "enact an environmental justice framework that empowers people in all communities." NCDEQ
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.