Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Much of the current angst at the UN regarding climate has to do with the idea of “climate reparations”. These are an imaginary debt supposedly owed by the major CO2 emitting nations to the countries of the developing world. As the story goes, we in the industrialized world have been “polluting” the atmosphere with the well-known plant food CO2, and despite the lack of any evidence of any damage caused, we’re supposed to pony up and pay the developing countries megabucks to ease their pain. 
In that regard, I’ve spent the morning laughing at the results I’ve gotten from the Japanese IBUKI satellite CO2 data. It shows the net CO2 flow (emission less sequestration) on a 1°x1° grid for the planet. Their website describes the project thusly:
The Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite “IBUKI” (GOSAT), developed jointly by the Ministry of the Environment Japan, the National Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (hereinafter the Three Parties), is the world’s first satellite designed specifically for monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from space.
The satellite has been in operation since its launch on January 23, 2009. The Three Parties will now publicly distribute the data of global CO2 fluxes on a monthly and regional basis for the one-year period between June 2009 and May 2010. These flux values were estimated from ground-based CO2 monitoring data and improved GOSAT-based CO2 concentration data.
It has been confirmed that uncertainties in CO2 flux estimates can be reduced by the addition of GOSAT data to the ground-based observations. This is the first concrete demonstration of the utility of satellite-based concentration data in the estimation of global CO2 fluxes.
It is expected that this progress in the field of global carbon cycle research will lead to more reliable climate change prediction and to the development of effective environmental policies for mitigating global warming in the future.
So why was I laughing? Well, let me unfold the story. First, here is the map showing the net emissions for 2010, the only full calendar year of data in the dataset:
Figure 1. Net emissions by gridcell, IBUKI satellite CO2 data. Click to embiggen.
Now, there are some interesting things about this map.
First, it appears to be pretty accurate. For example, if you look at the lower right part of Australia, you can see the two big cities of Sydney and Melbourne as red dots in the sea of blue.
Next, you can see that while the central Pacific is a net emitter of CO2 (yellow band from above Australia to South America), the intertropical convergence zone immediately north of that is a net absorber. I speculate that this is because of the large amount of rainfall in the area. Atmospheric CO2 dissolves in rain, which is why all rain is very slightly acid. This absorbs more CO2 than in the drier area to the south.
In addition you can see that the tropics emits about twice as much as the temperate zones per square metre … not what I expected.
Next, by and large where there are lots of humans there is a lot of CO2 emitted. Yes, there are also some areas where CO2 is being emitted without much human habitation … but generally, humans = CO2.
So … I figured I’d take the data and divide it up by country, to see how much CO2 each country either emits or absorbs. The answers were pretty surprising … Figure 2 shows the top 20 biggest net emitters of CO2.
Figure 2. Net emissions by country.
That’s where I started laughing … I can just see France demanding climate reparations from India, or the UK demanding reparations from the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo … It gets better. Figure 3 shows the top twenty sequestering nations …
Figure 3. Net sequestration by country.
Funnier and funnier … Sweden and Norway get to demand reparations from Russia, Finland can send a bill to the USA, while Australia can dun China for eco-megabucks.
Now … how can we understand some of these results? I will speculate, as I have no direct data … although it is claimed to be in the IBUKI datasets, I haven’t got there yet.
First, there are two big missing items in the previous standard CO2 accounting, sequestration and biomass burning. In most of the poor countries of the world, they are so ecologically conscious that they mainly use renewable energy for cooking and heating. And despite being all eco-sensitive and all these uncounted millions of open fires burning wood, twigs, and trash add up to a lot of CO2. Plus a bunch of pollution making up the “brown haze” over Asia, but that’s another question …
In addition, both India and China have huge permanent underground wildfires in their coal seams, spewing CO2 (plus really ugly pollution) 24/7. The other wild card is sequestration. In Australia, I speculate that it is due to the huge amount of exposed rock and sand. The mild acids in the rain and the dew dissolves the rocks and sand, sequestering the CO2.
In Canada, Norway, Sweden and Finland, I’ve got to assume that it has something to do with being far north and having lots of forests … but there are still lots of unanswered questions.
Anyhow, that was my fun for the morning … someone should write all of this up for the journals, I suppose, but I always feel like I have to give myself a lobotomy to write standard scientific prose.
Anyone want to go co-authors with me and handle the writing and the submission?
And my congratulations to my Argentinian, Brazilian, and Australian friends for winning the carbon lottery, they can demand climate reparations from every other country on the planet.
My best to everyone,
w.
BONUS GRAPHICS: Someone requested white color at the zero level:
And here are the breakdowns by region …
THE USUAL REQUEST: If you think that someone is wrong about something, please QUOTE THEIR EXACT WORDS. I SHOUT BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT. QUOTE THEIR WORDS so that we can all understand exactly what you are objecting to. If you object to a long comment and all you link to is the comment, that’s not useful. We need to know exactly what you think is incorrect, the exact words that you find to be in error.
CODE: It’s ugly, but it’s here. It’s an 18 Mb zip file including code, functions, data (NCDF files), and product sheet. I think all parts are there, ask if you have questions.
SPREADSHEET DATA: I’ve collated the country-level data into a CSV file here.
DATA: It took a while to find it, because it’s at another website. You have to register first. Afterwards, log in, click on “Product Search and Order”, and select L4A global CO2 flux.
PRODUCT SHEET: The details of the various CO2 products are here, from the same website, not sure if you have to log in first. It’s also in my zipped file above.
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This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about today, given that new satellite that just went up. It’ll be interesting to see what it shows.
Anyone care to wager odds on the raw data being available? Or do you think it’ll get corrected with no access to original data? Some of the things I read about the GOSAT indicated it might have a problem with dust fooling the CO2 detection. It’ll be interesting to see if they’ve resolved that. In any event, more data is better!
Thanks, Charles, fixed. Also, the dang WordPress ate all my carriage returns … fixed also.
w.
That is a cracker of an article Willis! Great find.
I am soooo proud to be an Aussie, hence ‘doing’ my bit to save Gaia from the invasion of the Carbon monster.
Thanks for the smile Willis. For both the data analysis and the thought that you need someone else’s help in writing. I find that papers have to be constructed in a slow laborious fashion, sort of like building a house, but then my writing skills are minimal.
My country of Canada is doing so well at sequestration that we can go full bore at the oil sands. Yipee!
Thanks, Willis, excellent article. I’m pleased with New Zealand’s result – the seventh largest CO2 sequestering nation on the earth. Not bad for a little short of 4.5 million people! I’ll let our Ministry for the Environment know and perhaps they’ll take the ETS tax off petrol, diesel, electricity, gas, etc. But don’t hold your breath.
“It is expected that this progress in the field of global carbon cycle research will lead to more reliable climate change prediction”
Ha ha ha. That’s a good one. Since climate change has nothing to do with CO2 concentrations or emissions, it’s a given that ANY predictions based on this data had better be ZERO HAPPENS or they will be TOTALLY WRONG.
As there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas and no gas at any concentration in the atmosphere can drive the climate, this is just part of the political agenda to decide who gets to pay for being humans not starving to death, per the UN’s Agenda 21.
Global warming “science” requires that the upper tropical troposphere must be warming faster than the surface. Not only is this region of the atmosphere not warmer, it has been cooling over the last few decades. [And the surface has not significantly warmed since 1992.] There is NO HOTSPOT in the upper tropical troposphere.
And, as that region is -17 deg C and the surface is 15 deg C, it is impossible for this atmosphere to warm the surface—completely against the laws of thermodynamics. Sure, pure CO2 in a bottle irradiated with IR radiation can get warmer, but that is a greenhouse effect in a bottle. The bottle prevents convection but our atmosphere has convection in the form of the water cycle, a huge global heat engine that ramps up with any warming and exerts a negative feedback effect. It is responsible for about 85% of the energy transport from the surface and is totally ignored by global warming “science.”
From the article above:
Odd. I cannot justify any reason for Antarctica to be a light green color.
The 14 Mkm^2 continental land areas and 3.5 Mkm^2 shelf ice are permanently ice-covered with very, very little precipitation. Ice will absorb little CO2 from the air compared to forests and tundra, but emit little either compared to deserts or burning fuels.
The seas are a near circular ice-covered band outside of the continental rock area extending 100 – 1600 km out from the land depending on day of the year, but that band will reduce significantly between October and February as the ice melts and exposes cold open ocean. So a yearly plot may be disguising significant CO2 absorption into the exposed and covered seas during part of the year.
In the Arctic, as the sea ice melts, more CO2 can dissolve into the newly-exposed waters that were formerly ice-covered. A benefit of melting Arctic ice? 8<)
Interesting that there is no European Union data – just a bunch of independent states. What a convenient union they have.
Check out the red in Indonesia!
They may have to institute volcano credits.
What then is this “Carbon Pollution”?
A sinister, evil collusion?
CO2, it is clean,
Makes for growth, makes it green,
A transfer of wealth, a solution.
Yes the transfer of wealth is already taking place in increased plant growth from CO2 producers to CO2 consumers.
http://lenbilen.com/2014/02/22/co2-the-life-giving-gas-not-carbon-pollution-a-limerick-and-explanation/
Is there any chance that climate reparations can be sought within a country itself from one party to another? If so, is IBUKI sensitive enough to detect this? Because I have a nagging suspicion, if it is, that Washington and its immediate suburbs would likely owe the rest of us in the US significant climate reparations. Of course they’d use our tax money to pay it.
The time period of this data is taken right during the 2009/10 El Nino. The mainly neutral ocean agrees with what F. Engelbeen was saying that the vegetation cycle is a large part of atmospheric co2 changes. It will be interesting to see the next year after this one as mid 2010 drops quickly to a -2 La Nina.
It would be nice to see the map with white as the neutral color, maybe 0.1 to -0.1, to better display the variation.
RACookPE1978 says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:42 pm
Thank, RA. If you look at the header in Figure 1, it gives the average value for the Antarctic (south of the dotted line at 66.5° south) as 0.001 … about as near to zero as one can get. As you point out, very little emission, very little absorption.
All the best,
w.
Hmm… this fits a theory of mine, although some readers will be tired of my thoughts on this. All atmospheric gases except diatomic oxygen are diamagnetic – repelled by a magnetic field in proportion to the strength of the field. Meanwhile, oxygen (O2) is surprisingly fairly paramagnetic – attracted to a magnetic field.
Originally, my thoughts on this related to the ozone hole, since ozone would, to some degree, be pushed away from the poles and, of course, most are aware of the low ozone over the poles except when it is being created by UV at maximum sun from abundant O2. The effect would be strengthened by the positive attraction of O2 to the polar areas which would tend to assist repelling of the other gases. It was then that I had the thought that this would also mean a coincident CO2, methane, N2, noble gases hole at the poles and a tendency to push the diamagnetic gases toward the low magnetic equator (confounded by weather and bio activity but possibly a measurable effect – most notably the inert noble gases).
Well the data of UBUKU is not conclusive but it doesn’t torpedo my idea. Here is a look at the Ozone hole. Note the thickening of the ozone in the temperate to equatorial zone, I like to say like the roll of a turtleneck sweater.
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Now if they would just do the other natural atmospheric gases, it might have something.
At about the start of 2010, Australia had really good rains over most of the country.
Massive greening of the deserts occurred.
The new plant growth would have been sucking up CO2 like nobody’s business. !
goldminor says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:13 pm
First, the ocean is not “mainly neutral”. It is slightly negative, which conceals the fact that it has areas of emission and areas of absorption of CO2.
Next, because it’s so big, despite being only mildly negative, the total sequestration is about -1.5 gigatonnes/year, about five times that of Argentina (see Figure 3) …
Here ya go … the problem is that it kind of occludes the variations on the land.
w.
Any animating gifs of this data? Will be very interesting to see full cycles complete with El Niños and volcanic eruptions.
Chiefio posted about the IBUKU results, back in October 2011. He showed the real kicker, which is the amount of CO2 taken up by various areas as compared with the amount emitted.
It turned out that the US, Europe and Russia absorbed approximately all the CO2 they emitted, mostly because of intense agriculture, and in the US also the re-growth of forests. Most of the net CO2 emissions came from sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and central China.
As Chiefio quoted, “Gesturing to an indelible deep green hue streaked across the United States and Europe [JAXA spokesman Sasano told TV viewers], “in the high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere emissions were less than absorption levels.””
So, as Chiefio noted, it appears that countries of the southern hemisphere and China owe CO2 reparations to Europe, Russia, and North America.
I would love to see this blogged against population size/CO2. Then the whole list would show per-capita.
Bets on, it will be surprising.
This IS funny.
Pat Frank says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:50 pm
Thanks, Pat. I’ll have to take a look at that, Chiefio does good work.
However, it’s not true at all that “the US, Europe and Russia absorbed approximately all the CO2 they emitted”. The US and Russia are shown in Figure 2, they definitely emit more than they absorb. Here’s the breakdown by region:
w.
Looks like a lot of emissions in central regions of Africa. Will they be sending a check soon?
How much impact does population density have? Surely millions of people in dense urban areas exhaling CO2 24/7 must have some noticeable effect?