Climate security

After a brief pause, carbon emissions are back on the rise

The road to a very hot place is paved with good intentions. No, not hell—just the future. Right now in Bonn, Germany, the UN Climate Change Conference is hosting representatives from all over the world, meeting to discuss how to keep the world from warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius, and how to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide to a net zero by 2050. That means that we won't put more greenhouse gasses into the air than can be removed.

Those are the goals agreed to by countries that signed on to the Paris Agreement, which now includes every country in the world—though the current administration in the United States has vowed to leave the pact.

Countries signed on to the ambitious goal and pledged to reduce their carbon output. But signing was the easy part. Turning those pledges into action is another matter entirely, as evidenced by new studies published Monday in Environmental Research Letters, Nature Climate Change, and Earth System Science Data. The research, conducted by the Global Carbon Project, found that carbon emissions for 2017 were expected to increase by two percent, after a three-year period when emissions leveled off.