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"The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The major feature of the Kyoto Protocol is that it sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions .These amount to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012. "

"Giles Parkinson First, the good news. Australia will, as expected, comfortably meet its Kyoto emission reduction target, and won't get into trouble with the international community when its report card is due at the end of 2012. Even though emissions from the electricity sector will have grown by 51 per cent from 1990 through to 2012, the last-minute deal negotiated at Kyoto by Senator Robert Hill - which allowed Australia to claim reduction of land clearing after levelling half of Queensland just before the baseline year - means it will deliver on its generous national quota of 108 per cent of its 1990 emissions. It will likely come in at just over 106 per cent, and will no doubt give itself a gold star for doing so. Now, the bad news. The task of meeting Australia's pledge to the Copenhagen Accord has just gotten a lot harder. The government's latest emissions trajectory report reveals emissions growth shows little sign of abating in the short term, and may accelerate because of the impact of the massive LNG projects off the north-west of the country and increased coal exports."

At the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the latest on-site measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography reveal that global atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2) concentrations reached 391.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, up from 388.56 ppm in 2010 and from 280 ppm from pre-industrial times. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in order to have a 90-percent chance of avoiding dangerous changes in climate, greenhouse-gases (GHGs) concentrations need to be stabilized at 450 ppm, which would roughly translate into an average temperature increase of 2° Celsius. This means that to stabilize GHG concentrations at 450 ppm, global GHG emissions will need to peak before 2015 and be reduced to 50 percent of their 2000 level by 2050.