Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emission will rise to a record 36 billion tons this year, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project.
The report, compiled by 49 researchers from 10 countries, underlines the failure of governments to check green house gas (GHG) emission responsible for global warming.
The 2013 estimate represents a 2.1 percent gain versus 2012 and a 61 percent increase since 1990, the baseline year for the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, according to Reuters.
The new report shows that the rate of growth in global CO2 emissions is down slightly on the previous year’s 2.2 percent increase but is only slightly lower than the average growth of 2.7 percent a year in the last 10 years.
“Emissions must fall substantially and rapidly if we are to limit global climate change to below 2 degrees Celsius,” said the report’s lead author, Corinne Le Quere of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Britain’s University of East Anglia, in a statement.
The strong growth in coal consumption has outweighed any reductions from the rapid growth in renewable energy in recent years, according to Glen Peters, an author of the report based at CICERO, a climate research institute in Norway.
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