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    Global Warming "Is Happening Faster"
    By Paul Eccleston and Charles Clover
    The Telegraph UK

    Tuesday 23 October 2007

    A weakening in the Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere means that global warming is happening faster than we thought, scientists said yesterday.

    Scientists thought that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere would grow in line with the world economy.

    The latest figures show, however, that over the past seven years CO2 concentrations have grown 35 per cent faster, partly because the ability of the Southern Ocean and other carbon "sinks" such as vegetation and forests to take it up has been reduced.

    It is a development which has alarmed scientists from the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) who compared the period 1970-2000 with the past seven years.

    They found that increasing use of coal-fired power stations rather than cleaner alternatives, had increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere by 17 per cent above anticipated levels, based on economic projections.

    At the same time there had been a decline in the ability of ocean and land 'sinks' to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere which resulted in an 18 per cent increase.

    Over half the decline of the carbon sink efficiency was the result of intensifying winds in Antarctica's Southern Ocean disrupting the sea's ability to store carbon, the scientists said.

    If the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas there are fears that global warming leading to climate change will get worse.

    By 2006, CO2 emissions, the most important greenhouse gas, were up to 9.9 billion tons of carbon, 35 per cent above emissions in 1990, the year of the Kyoto Protocol. (Coincidentally that 35 per cent increase is the same as the increase in concentrations in the atmosphere over the past seven years, but there is no connection.)

    The findings, produced by more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments, indicated that 30 years of improvements in global emissions, caused by improvements in technology, had now stalled. They are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

    The study's author Dr Corinne Le Quere, of UEA and the British Antarctic Survey, said the results had come as a shock.

    "We expected that emissions would grow because of the expansion in the world economy but not because of a weakening in the sinks. Only the most extreme climate models predicted this. We didn't think it would happen until the second half of the century," she said.

    The findings come just days after other research at UEA revealed that the levels of CO2 in the north Atlantic had reduced by about 50 per cent from the mid-1990s to 2005.

    Dr Le Quere said it was difficult to pinpoint where the sinks had weakened apart from the Southern Ocean where winds had increased because of climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer.

    The stronger winds were causing more "mixing" of the waters, bringing carbon up from the deep seas where it was stored and raising the carbon concentration of the surface water, which allowed less CO2 to dissolve into the ocean from the atmosphere.

    A decrease in fossil fuel efficiency had also accounted for speeding up the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, she said.

    " For 30 years we had technical improvements in carbon intensity but this has stalled since 2000 and this has had a major effect.

    "There's been a slow change from oil and gas to coal which is more CO2 intensive. As developing countries grow so does their use of energy and coal is easier to access and cheaper."

    "Developed countries have not been providing massive investment in technology to counteract that.

    "We had anticipated that the growth in CO2 would follow the world economy but we had not anticipated that we would not be as efficient as we were being and the sinks would not respond."

    Dr Le Quere warned: "The decline in global sink efficiency suggests that stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 is even more difficult to achieve than previously thought."

    But she said there was still time to take action and that technical improvements could have a huge impact.

    "The study shows we can control the growth of CO2 but we have to be more aggressive on a global scale."

    The study's lead author and executive director of the Global Carbon Project, Dr Pep Canadell, said: "In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slowdown of natural sinks and the halt to improvements in the carbon intensity of wealth production."