Also one can note that India and China, which have ratified the Kyoto protocol are freed from any obligation to reduce their emissions, especcially remarkable reading that China, who is said to produce one new coal powered plant every tenth day, now have passed USA as being the largest ‘emission polluter’ in the world.

We are already on the brink of large Methane emissions from the tundra as well as under our oceans, we have over four hundred areas worldwide where no fish exist. The oceans waves are moving faster due to the warming of the seas and the acidity of those oceanic ‘heat-sinks’ are rapidly rising, making life impossible.

The CO2 cycle from ‘release’ to it being ‘absorbed’ into various heat-sinks as the ocean or land is at least fifty years, maybe more. So whatever we do now won’t stop those years already ‘up there’ raising our temperature. The cycle for Methane is around twenty years.

“Methane Gas hydrates are a potential energy source found in permafrost environments and under the sea floor. They form when water and methane gas come together under extreme pressure and in a cold environment.

The water and gas are frozen together at a molecular level. One cubic metre of gas hydrates contains 164-cubic-metres of methane gas, and 0.8 cubic metres of water.”

And if those ‘deposits’ are released by the Earths warming up you can say goodbye to a breathable environment, at least for us humans .

This are hard facts, not ‘protocols’.
So do you think we can stand up to those demands?
Talk some more? Spend our money on bolstering car companies and oil?
Thank God for that the Arctic is disappearing so that we can get to those ‘new’ gas and oil deposits?

Nah..

in Siberia Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden told the Independent newspaper in an email from the vessel Jacob Smirnitskyi.

”
“An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane.

“Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These ‘methane chimneys’ were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instrument].”

At some locations he said concentrations of the gas were 100 times the background level. These anomalies were documented in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres.

Gustafsson added: “The conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place.

“The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leaking methane.”

Estimates for the amount of carbon locked up in the hydrates vary from 500 to 5000 gigatonnes. Scientists predict that warming will release some of these deposits, but modeling the temperature rise that would trigger significant releases has proved extremely difficult.”

A potentially more important point was mentioned by Paul; developed countries are exporting their emissions by transferring manufacturing to developing countries. I don’t know how much: are there any useful figures?

A true accounting of emissions would include all emissions related to consumption of goods in a given country. That means that if a car is imported, the emissions from its manufacture (which nowadays would probably exceed the lifetime emissions from the car itself) should be included in the accounts of the importing country, not the manufacturing country.

Given that, for some reason, people seem to regard a few % points change as important, this factor, and population change, are much more important than whatever emissions changes go on within Western countries.

If the EU is importing more of its manufactured goods now than in 1997, and I suspect it is, then exercises like Figure ES-1 have little global relevance.

Meanwhile, of course, emissions from developing countries have been rising rapidly, more than making up for any reductions by developed countries. More than half of man-made CO2 emissions now come from developing countries. So, I don’t see any possibility for actually reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Prins and Rayner have pointed out how ineffective Kyoto style policies are at reducing emissions.

The EU is now struggling to agree on a 20% reduction in emissions by 2020 – Italy and Poland won’t accept the policy as it stands. The UK being the home of King Canute has set a target of an 80% reduction in its miniscule 1.8% contribution to global man-made CO2 emissions by 2050, without any real clue as to how it will be achieved.

You are confusing Europe as a continent with the EU. EU population is currently 495 million. It is projected to peak at 521 million in 2035 and then to slowly decline. See:

http://europa.eu/ rapid/ pressReleasesAction.do?reference=STAT/ 08/ 119&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

These are the EU official figures.

http://english.wijkman.se/default.asp?id=1