Credit: Daily Beast

In a year when climate change is moving from abstract theory to grimly tangible reality, a faint dot of hope may be on the horizon.

China, the world’s largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions, may have hit the peak it promised in the Paris climate accord well before its 2030 timetable. That’s the conclusion reached by scientists who looked at the country’s estimated carbon output between 2007 and 2016, as the country’s rapid industrialization slowed and its consumption of coal declined. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“They are able to manage quite significant economic growth, but have been able to stabilize their emissions over the past few years,” said Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain.

Guan and his colleagues estimate Chinese emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases topped out in 2013 at about 9.5 billion tons. The numbers declined to about 9.2 billion tons in 2016, the last […]