Global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels jumped last year by 564 million tons, the largest absolute increase ever recorded. The degree of annual increase, nearly 6 percent, was greater than any since 2003, signaling that the drop in emissions caused by the recent world-wide economic recession would not be sustained.

Scientists contributing to the report issued by the Global Carbon Project  do not think 2010’s extraordinary growth in emissions will persist. Rather, they expect yearly growth to be around 3 percent – close to triple the growth rate in the 1990s.

Due largely to the aggressive building of coal-fired electrical plants, China emerged as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. Its emissions increased by 10.4 percent in 2010, compared to 4 percent in the U.S. Together the two countries account for 50 percent of the overall increase in greenhouse gases. In contrast, other industrialized countries which were signatories of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol have reduced their emissions overall, achieving the targeted reduction in emissions of about 8 percent below 1990 levels.

The 2010 level of emissions push the forecast for future temperature averages beyond the worst-case scenarios of earlier projections. Climate scientists cite the inability to curb the rise in emissions, let alone the failure to halt emissions, as surely increasing the difficulty, if not guaranteeing the impossibility, of forestalling drastic changes in the climate in the coming decades.

The Global Carbon Project was formed in 2001 to assist the international science community in establishing a common, mutually agreed-upon knowledge base to support policy debate and actions to slow the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.