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According to an international consortium of scientists, the annual carbon dioxide emission rate has more than tripled this decade, compared to the last decade.
The emissions increased at a rate of 3.4% per year from 2000 to 2008, as opposed to 1% each year over the earlier decade, scientists from the Global Carbon Project said.
The team contains 30 researchers from around the globe, including Scott C. Doney, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Richard A. Houghton, senior scientist and acting director of the Woods Hole Research Centre (WHRC).
Since 2000, there has been an overall increase of 29 percent in global carbon dioxide emissions. They attributed the rise to increasing production and trade of manufactured products, particularly from developing economies, the gradual shift from oil to coal and the planet's declining ability to take in the gas that is the main cause of global warming.
Doney headed a team that developed ocean-model simulations for estimating the historical variations in air-sea carbon dioxide fluxes.
"Over the last decade, CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions have continued to climb despite efforts to control emissions," he said. "Preliminary evidence suggests that the land and ocean may be becoming less effective at removing CO2 from the atmosphere, which could accelerate future climate change."
An important factor of the report, according to Doney, was the work of Houghton, acting director of WHRC. "He developed the estimates of carbon emissions from deforestation, a major source of human-driven carbon emissions," Doney said, according to WHOI release.
"Although the emissions of CO2 from deforestation accounted for only about 15 percent of total CO2 emissions over the period 2000-2008, reducing deforestation is one of the activities that could contribute significantly to stabilising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere," Houghton said.
These studies have been published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.
