This is an even faster rate than detailed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fourth Assessment Report, which currently serves as the accepted truth in international climate negotiations and policy. The figures are not absolutely comparable (the IPCC includes deforestation, for example, whereas the JRC doesn't), but broadly the JRC's 15 percent compares to the IPCC's 10 percent between 2000 and 2004. In other words, the rate of emissions increase according to the JRC has been about half as fast again as the IPCC's assessment.

Meanwhile, demonstrating great powers of joined-up thinking, the European Commission's president Jose Manuel Barroso, on the same day the JRC data was released, made a speech to businessmen in Copenhagen in which the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report orthodoxy was rigidly adhered to. Business could be part of the solution to climate change, Barroso said, and to this end it must contribute to developed country emission cuts of 25-40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990, as advocated by the IPCC.

But if the JRC is to be believed, and emissions are rising as rapidly as their data shows, the emissions turnaround is going to have to be even more dramatic if disaster is to be avoided. Nevertheless, EU countries have so far only committed to cut their emissions by 20 percent by 2020 (and that includes carbon offsets from the developing world). Other developed nations have so far agreed to do even less.

It should also be noted that even the Commission's policy of adhering, more or less, to the IPCC's advice and making more long term emission cuts of 50 percent globally by 2050, will, as Barroso said in his speech, give just a 50 percent chance of keeping the global temperature rise at two degrees Celsius or less. Even if major efforts are successfully made in the next couple of decades to curb greenhouse gases, avoidance of disasterous global heating is still, essentially, down to a flip of the coin.