The Earth is heating up faster than had previously been predicted due to rapid economic growth. Since 2000 emissions from fossil fuels has increased by nearly 3% a year up from 1% a year in the good ‘ol 90’s.

As people get wealthier - they uh, well, spend more money. That means an increase in consumer goods, creating the goods, garbage and car emissions. Gross. The Australian report found that about 8 billion tons of carbon were emmited into the air in 2005 as C02 compared to the 6 billion in 1995 - that is a huge jump.

Countries will only continue to develope, and any economic growth chart is going to show you that during the stages of industrialization there will be periods of massive and inefficient fossil fuel use. Later it will level off, such has been done in places like the U.S, Canada and Australia… but countries like India and China are pretty much just starting.

The U.S and Europe in the past have accounted for over 50% of the global emissions in the past 200 years, where as China has previously accounted for only about 8%, but now China is “catching up”.

International efforts to fix this problem are pretty much not going to work. You can’t tell China to slow down because the U.S is full of screw ups.  

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the world as a whole was becoming better at producing more energy for the same CO₂ emissions, and more GDP with less energy. But the trend reversed in 2000. “It’s a problem because people are assuming we are heading towards a more energy efficient future and we are not,” says Le Quéré.

The researchers found that no part of the world reduced the amount of carbon used to produce energy between 2000 and 2004, despite widespread publicity in support of greener sources of energy.

The analysis also showed that developing countries accounted for 73% of the growth in CO₂ emissions in 2004, but only 41% of total emissions.

“If you follow anything to do with global policy or global economy these results will not be surprising,” says Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK.

The researchers gathered data from two US government sources, CDIAC and EIA, and compared them to IPCC scenarios (solid coloured lines). The IPPC predicts that the A1F1 scenario will lead to a 4°C rise in temperature by 2100 (Image: PNAS)