Carbon emissions have sped up since 2000

World emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide increased three times faster after 2000 than in the 1990s, putting them at the high end of a range of forecasts by an international climate change panel, scientists report. Carbon emissions grew at a 3.1% annual rate between 2000 and 2004, compared to 1.1% per year in the previous decade, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lead author Dr Mike Raupach, from Australia's CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Global Carbon Project, says that nearly 8 billion tonnes of carbon were emitted globally into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide in 2005 compared with 6 billion tonnes in 1995.

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