From the Global Carbon Project's Carbon Budget 2007:

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are growing x4 faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, and above the worst case emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Less Developed Countries are now emitting more carbon than Developed Countries.

The carbon intensity of the world’s economy is improving slower than previous decades.

The efficiency of natural sinks has decreased by 5% over the last 50 years (and will continue to do so in the future), implying that the longer it takes to begin reducing emissions significantly, the larger the cuts needed to stabilize atmospheric CO2.

All these changes have led to an acceleration of atmospheric CO2 growth 33% faster since 2000 than in the previous two decades, implying a stronger climate forcing and sooner than expected.

So, despite having a world climate treaty in Kyoto, world carbon emissions are rising at a rate that really should scare the shit out of us. Not only that, the problem has accelerated since 2000.

China and India are coming on strong. Viva globalization. :(

Not only that, carbon intensity improvement -- the amount of carbon produced per unit of output -- is falling, which means we're getting slack about using carbon-based energy efficiently, let alone making absolute reductions.

Natural sinks include forests and soil. If their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere is declining, that means we'll have to make deeper cuts in carbon output.

Here's some thoughts from climate scientists, as taken from a Sept. 25 AP article on CTV.ca:

"Things are happening very, very fast," said Corinne Le Quere, professor of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey. "It's scary."

Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said he was surprised at the results because he thought world emissions would drop because of the economic downturn. That didn't happen.

"If we're going to do something (about reducing emissions), it's got to be different than what we're doing," he said. ...

What is "kind of scary" is that the worldwide emissions growth is beyond the highest growth in fossil fuel predicted just two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Under the panel's scenario then, temperatures would increase by somewhere between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 to 6.3 degrees Celsius) by the year 2100.

If this trend continues for the century, "you'd have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic," said Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider.

To see possibly how catastrophic, read this 2007 post -- 'The hellish vision of life on a hotter planet'