Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5% to 5% annual increase in emissions between 2004 and 2010. But the new analysis, Science Daily reported, puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11% for the same time period.
The US researchers’ most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions in China over the country’s levels in 2000.
In a separate statement, China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi said on Wednesday that criticism of the country’s high levels of emissions was unfair and unscientific.
"Climate change is mainly attributable to the long-term emissions by developed countries in the past and their current high per capita emissions," Reuters reported Yang as saying.
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