Carbon emissions touch 10 billion tones

Carbon emissions touch 10 billion tones Worldwide carbon emissions have reached a total of 10 billion tones, doubling in the last two decades, according to the team at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The increase confirms a trend of rising emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. Scientists believe that it will result in severe climate change in coming few decades. The figures published in Nature Climate Change show that it might be very difficult for the governments to control the global warming from increasing more than 2C from the pre-industrialized levels.

The study comes at a time when world leaders are gathering in Durban, South Africa for a UN summit to agree on a globally accepted mechanism to reduce carbon emissions. The UN appears in a position where it is impossible for it to draft binding agreements.

The world's largest emitters, the US, China and India are not willing to agree to legally binding emission reduction targets under the UN and have only adopted steps to reduce emissions voluntarily. The study infuses a great sense of urgency to the talks by global leaders in Durban.

"One tarnished silver lining of the global financial crisis was that it brought about a drop in greenhouse gas emissions. From this latest study we see that the drop was all too ephemeral and even the limp economic recovery of 2010 has put us back on a high emissions trajectory," said Dr David Reay, Senior Lecturer in Carbon Management at the University of Edinburgh.