China’s CO2 emission in millions of metric tons from 1980 to 2009:
Source, EIA: http://www.eia.gov/countries/img/charts_png/CH_co2con_img.png
From Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Atmospheric scientists release first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s CO2 emissions
Estimates capitalize on instrumental measurements of CO2 in smokestacks and pollutants in the air by satellites and surface stations
Cambridge, Mass. – July 6, 2012 – Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China’s CO2 emissions.
The independent estimates, rooted in part in measurements of pollutants both at the sources and in the air, may be the most accurate totals to date. The resulting figures offer an unbiased basis on which China might measure its progress toward its well-publicized CO2 control goals.
The findings were published July 4 in the journal Atmospheric Environment.
“China’s emissions of CO2 are of central concern in efforts to combat global climate change,” says lead author Yu Zhao, a former postdoctoral researcher at Harvard SEAS who is now a professor at the Nanjing University School of Environment in China. “But despite all of the attention to China’s CO2 emissions, they’re less well quantified than most people realize.”
Existing estimates for these emissions are calculated “top-down,” based on annual energy statistics that are released by the Chinese government. The nation has only once officially estimated its CO2 emissions, based on national energy statistics from 1994, although it is now constructing a data system to produce periodic national greenhouse gas inventories. Non-Chinese organizations, such as the U.S. Department of Energy and the Netherlands Environment Agency, produce widely cited CO2 estimates for China (among other countries), but these are also based on the national energy data.
A study published last month by a China–U.K.–U.S. team in Nature Climate Change spotlighted a large disparity in estimates of Chinese CO2 emissions when the numbers were based on national energy statistics versus summed provincial data. To illustrate the contrast, those researchers had applied a standardized U.N. protocol for estimating the emissions of any developing country by sector.
The new Harvard–Nanjing study goes deeper, however, constructing a “bottom-up” emission inventory that is specific to China’s energy and technology mix. It combines the results of Chinese field studies of CO2 emissions from diverse combustion processes with a plant-by-plant data set for power generation, independent research on transportation and rural biomass use, and provincial-level energy statistics for the remaining sectors.
The Harvard-Nanjing team believes provincial energy data to be more accurate than national statistics because the provincial data have been empirically tested in peer-reviewed atmospheric studies that compare the expected emissions of conventional air pollutants to actual instrumental observations by satellites and ground stations. Provincial statistics also take into account the large quantities of coal produced by small, illegal mines.
“There are several different ways to estimate emissions of greenhouse gases or air pollutants, from those designed to support policy processes to those made by scientists researching atmospheric transport and chemistry,” explains co-author Chris Nielsen, Executive Director of the Harvard China Project, which is based at SEAS.
The former methods suit the needs of policy, attributing emissions to identifiable sources for actionable controls, but the latter are often more environmentally accurate, according to Nielsen.
“The methods used by atmospheric scientists can be more complete, incorporating new research on dispersed sources that are poorly represented in official statistics or weakly targeted by policy—such as the burning of crop wastes in fields or biofuels in poor, rural homes,” Nielsen explains. “The data are also more detailed in spatial terms. This allows a comparison of emission estimates to the pollution levels measured at the surface, or from space, testing the underlying energy data in the process.”
The new study capitalizes on prior tests and a bottom-up data framework that has been demonstrated for conventional air pollutants to produce a more thorough estimate of China’s CO2 emissions.
The new study also quantifies the uncertainty of the emission totals, applying formal statistical methods. For instance, the team found that the 95% confidence interval for the 2005 CO2 estimate lies between −9% and +11% of the central value. This relatively wide range means that measuring China’s achievement of its national CO2 control targets may be more difficult—and potentially more contentious—than generally recognized by Chinese and international policy actors.
“The levels of uncertainty indicate that Chinese domestic frameworks to set control targets for CO2 emissions at scales larger than individual factories, such as provinces or sectors, may reflect unwarranted confidence in the measurability and verifiability of the impacts of policy interventions,” says senior author Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies at SEAS.
“Such levels of uncertainty aren’t unique to China among developing and emerging economies,” Zhao cautions. “All have less-developed data systems than those that have been built up over decades to serve energy markets and environmental regulation in the United States and other industrialized countries. It’s critical that international agreements to limit CO2 emissions recognize these differences in national data conditions.”
Beyond the policy implications, the availability of accurate estimates of China’s CO2 emissions (and the related uncertainties in the data) can improve scientists’ understanding of the global carbon cycle and the physical processes driving global climate change.
The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
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I look forward to Bill McKibben and James Hansen going to China to protest in the streets.
[UPDATE] I trust that Anthony won’t mind if I add a comment here.
I’d seen this before, and thought “What’s the big deal”? It didn’t seem much different from what I’d read about before.
So I’ve graphed up the old data from the CDIAC, and compared it to the New! Improved! graph at the top of the page … here’s the result:
I gotta say, the Harvard guys are making a mountain out of a molehill. To read their puff piece, they’ve made huge strides in measuring Chinese emissions, but in fact the old method gives just about the same answer … which is that the Chinese are crushing the competition in the CO2 sweepstakes.
I’ve included the US emissions, because they show a very important point. If we were able somehow magically to reduce our emissions to their 1980 levels, that reduction would be offset by the Chinese gains in one single year. In other words, what the US does is meaningless in global terms.
w.
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Willis,
Thanks for your reply to my “rant”. You claim my post demonstrates a definite political stance (and that I think everyone should share it). I think you’re mistaking me for someone more like yourself.
I am a former scientist, with a Ph.D in molecular genetics. What I care about is science and facts. And (despite some deplorable behaviour, unwarranted alarmism and outright crackpot views displayed by some “warmers”) it is a fact that CO2 is a GHG and that human activity is emitting enough of it to make a difference to the earth’s radiative energy balance and (despite all the efforts taken at WUWT to show how any individual weather event can’t be directly attributed to global warming) it is clear that this is already having undesirable consequences. How severe the eventual consequences might be is unclear (and highly deserving of further research), but it doesn’t look good.
The other inconvenient truth (to borrow a very apt phrase) is that we only have one planet to live on, and unless we have fundamentally misunderstood the laws of physics there is no practical possibility of humanity establishing itself elsewhere within the next hundred thousand years or so.
In the circumstances, the actions that might or might not be appropriate for individuals or governments to take is a hugely important issue and should be fully and extensively debated.
But you can’t legitimately argue that because certain proposed actions that might be taken because of (or in the name of) AGW are economically or politically undesirable, the underlying facts and science of AGW must be wrong. And that is, I’m afraid, the argument I see being made loud and clear all the time on WUWT. Maybe I’m reading more of this in the comment threads than in the main posts, but it is very clearly present here. Such comments are almost never treated with the approach that genuine scientific scepticism would suggest.
As for my political views, I believe that, if humanity is to survive, it must do so within the constraints of the finite system we inhabit. That, as far as I am concerned, is not a political belief, but merely a statement of fact. Politically, I’d say my beliefs are that (a) the continued existence of humanity is highly desirable, and (b) it would be unacceptable to kill off (say) 6 billion people in order to allow the remaining 1 billion to enjoy a way of life that involves using rather more than one seven-billionth of the sustainable level of resources per person.
Nigel Harris says:
July 7, 2012 at 8:20 am
I’ll leave that without comment and let the readers decide.
Nigel, thanks for your reply. You are a scientist and you say that what you care about are facts. So why are you bothering us with uncited, unsupported, unverified claims?
For example, you say regarding CO2 that “it is clear that this is already having undesirable consequences.” Unfortunately, that is not clear at all, and is not even remotely supported by the evidence. While it might work elsewhere, if you wish to make such claims here, I fear you’ll have to provide more than your opinion. You’ll have to provide observational, factual evidence for your opinion. Not guesses. Not passionate statements. Not political opinions. Not computer model results. Evidence.
Oh, please, now you can see a hundred thousand years into the future?
We could assuredly terraform Mars in that time, or mine the asteroids and set up space colonies. I understand and agree with your underlying point, that at present we only have one planet to live on and we need to take care of it … but making a hundred thousand year forecast is about as far from science as a molecular geneticist might get. We have no clue what might be possible by then.
Agreed.
I’d have to see a citation for someone here saying that. Seriously, I don’t see anyone making that claim, that because the economics of carbon mitigation suck so badly, the science must be wrong. Evidence, Nigel, evidence.
Perhaps there are some loonies making that claim in the comments, although I’ve not seen them. If there are such comments, I wouldn’t treat them “with the approach that genuine scientific scepticism would suggest”. I’d ignore them as beyond the event horizon of the black hole of stupidity, from which no one returns, and not worth wasting one second of my time on. If you want to fight them, be my guest …
“Sustainable level of resources”? You’ll first have to define that term for me, because as far as I’m concerned, nothing is sustainable.
Second, “kill off six billion people”? My friend, nobody but AGW supporters are proposing that we kill off six billion people, and not many of them are that far out on the edge. No one here, to my knowledge, has made that claim, so it’s totally unclear what you are referring to.
Third, fundamentally development is not a matter of resources. It is a matter of energy. Take water as an example, it’s short in many regions, and you’d think that would be an absolute resource limit.
But Israel gets about a quarter of its fresh water from the ocean, and when it finishes its new desalinization plants, it will be getting more than half of its water from the ocean. How? With energy. Without energy, they’d be dying of dehydration, but with energy, water is endlessly abundant for the Israelis.
Here’s another example. In the 1930s there was a magnesium crisis, something similar to the “peak oil” nonsense. Everyone was claiming that we’d run out of magnesium very soon. Then some smart chemist invented a way to extract magnesium from sea water … oops, what was a scarce resource being used at what you would call an “unsustainable” level suddenly became overwhelmingly abundant.
How can a scarce resource become abundant? Energy … without it the magnesium stays locked up in the ocean. With energy, nobody need run short of magnesium until the oceans run dry … you speak of a “sustainable level of resources” as though that were a fixed rate, when in fact how long our resources can sustain us is only limited by energy and human ingenuity.
Look at natural gas for another example. It was in short supply not many years ago. Then some smart folks figured out how to drill horizontally 3,000 feet under the earth, and now there’s a surfeit of natural gas. Beyond that, there are methane clathrates on most of the continental shelves, an unimaginably huge supply of untapped energy.
So given all that, what is the “sustainable level” of energy consumption, Nigel?
The part that the “sustainable resource” folks miss is that in almost all cases, we don’t need the resource itself. We only need what the resource provides, and in almost all cases there are other ways to provide it.
For example, some years ago I saw an estimate of the amount of copper that it was going to take to provide the world with telephones. It was a horrendously huge number, and the author of the piece was of your opinion, that it would never be possible for everyone on the planet to have the same level of phone service we had in the developed world, because we’d run out of copper long before that.
Does this argument sound familiar to you? It should, because you made this identical argument above.
Of course, it was nonsense. Today most of the world has cell phones that run wirelessly, and infinitely more information travels on the finest threads of glass or is moved by satellite than runs through copper … we don’t need the copper, Nigel, we only need the communication. And that is a fundamental error at the base of your needless concern about “sustainable resources”.
My best to you,
w.
Nigel said:
“emitting enough of it to make a difference to the earth’s radiative energy balance ”
That’s anyother AGW canard, when in fact no such difference has been measured in the many decades of orbital IR observations.
The CO2 line is no wider and no colder, and as a matter of fact it’s spatial and temporal fluctuations are as nearly as great as those of space-measured air temperature.
Neither the radiation nor the temperature have been measured as undergoing any long-term global change.
Evidence, Nigel, evidence, not repetitous factoids spun out of thin air.
And while we’re at it, the poles are not dying and sea level is not accelerating.
Is that skeptical enough for you?
The only thing being denied these days is climate science’s obligation to disprove the null hypothesis of natural variation, which has yet to be done, hockey sticks notwithstanding.
Well, if you close down industrial production in the West, it has to go somewhere. But it went to a nation that does not give a stuff about pollution controls, and so the net result of Green legislation in the West has been to INCREASE world CO2 emissions.
Great strategy, by the Greens.
.
Ian W.;
+2
The more CO2, the better. The warmer (= warmer winters and high latitudes), the better. Even drastic warming would take ’00s or ‘000s of years to melt Greenland or Antarctica, by which time coping mechanisms will be inconceivably advanced over present day.
Bring it on! Faster, please!