Breakthrough: New <i>Climatic Change</i> Analysis Challenges IPCC Scenarios

A new study in the journal Climatic Change confirms reports that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has drastically underestimated the rate of emissions growth. The new study points to far more rapid global economic growth, driven largely by China and Asia, as a major source behind far higher global emissions increases. The report comes days after a new study found that China's annual emissions are now 14 percent higher than U.S. emissions.

The study, New Global Growth Path," was done by Australian energy analyst Peter Sheehan. Here are his findings:

Given the new global growth path, emissions will need to peak much earlier than previously thought, and then start going down, if we are to stabilize at 550 ppm.

"The New Growth Path" challenges the "gradual model." Sheehan writes that achieving widely desired climate goals, such as stabilizing at 550 ppm or keeping temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, requires "major reductions in global emissions relative to the NGP path necessary within the next decade. If, on present policies, CO2 emissions in 2020 are likely to be nearly double their 2000 level and still rising rapidly, there is an apparent conflict between the gains from gradualism and the need for immediate, large scale reductions relative to that reference path" (Sheehan 18).

Facts on Much Faster Growth: From 1972 - 2002, global GDP grew 3.5 percent. From 2002 - 2006, GDP grew 4.7 percent. IMF predicts 4.9 percent growth, 2002 - 2012 (Sheehan 1 - 2).

Energy consumption grew 72 percent, (11 percent per year), 2001 - 2006. Real energy use was 15 percent higher in 2006 than Chinese government had projected for 2010 (Sheehan 5).

Higher growth between 2002 - 2006 is the beginning of a new trend. Higher growth due to China and India, developing nations, revival of Japan, re-emergence of Russia and other former Communist states, low inflation, greater trade, greater financial flows.

More Reason to Update IPCC Scenarios. Sheehan writes

The SRES scenarios were a substantial intellectual achievement, and have stood the test of time for almost a decade. But the central feature of global economic trends in the early decades of the 21st Century -- the new growth path shaped by the sustained emergence of China and India, in the context of an open, knowledge-based world economy -- could not be forseen in the 1990s, and is not covered by these scenarios. Many of the SRES scenarios are not longer individually plausible, and as a whole the marker scenarios can no longer be said to 'describe the most important uncertainties'. As a result, and especially given the emissions intensity of the new growth path, there is an urgent need for new approaches.

Roger Pielke, Jr. writes:

Unfortunately, a major obstacle to discussing (much less achieving) new approaches are the very public intellectual and political commitments that have been advanced, based on the earlier assumptions. Unwinding these commitments -- as we have seen -- will take some doing... As yet, the dots [between China's emissions and IPCC scenarios] remain to be connected between such trends unfolding before our eyes and their incongruity with assumptions in energy policy assessments. But reality and policy assessments can diverge only for so long.

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