Carbon emission levels are rising faster than most scientists had predicted. Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr. explains why the current approach to predicting CO2 emissions leads to bad predictions and failed analyses.
By Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, jr., cross posted from Prometheus
The AP covers the new reports of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere:
The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said Thursday.
The new numbers, called "scary" by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use. Instead, carbon dioxide output jumped 3 percent from 2006 to 2007.
That's an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.
Readers of our recent paper in Nature (PDF) won't be surprised at all by this report. I'm not sure which is more scary -- rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels or the failed analysis of the IPCC that remains largely unacknowledged.
The rapidly increasing carbon dioxide levels are a surprise only because the IPCC failed to anticipate them. The "surprise" is thus due to a failed analysis. Effective policy is unlikely to result from failed policy analyses. This would seem obvious. Somewhat perversely, the failed analysis is often used to justify going more quickly in the wrong direction. But it seems that the poverty of the current approach is starting to be realized:
Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he was surprised at the results because he thought world emissions would drop because of the economic downturn. That didn't happen.
"If we're going to do something (about reducing emissions), it's got to be different than what we're doing," he said.
