China could be hiding an entire Japan’s worth of carbon emissions

Let’s go ahead and state the obvious: It will be impossible to hash out any sort of global agreement on climate change if we can’t even agree on how much carbon-dioxide different countries are actually putting into the air.

Yet the data on this can be surprisingly unreliable — particularly in the case of the world’s biggest carbon emitter, China. A new paper in Nature Climate Change finds that there’s a real mystery as to how much carbon China is actually emitting. The national-level statistics say one thing. The provincial-level statistics say another. And the gap between the two numbers came to about 1.4 gigatons in 2010 — a staggering amount, equivalent to all the carbon-dioxide that Japan put into the air that year.

WaPo

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2 Responses to China could be hiding an entire Japan’s worth of carbon emissions

  1. Eric Baumholer

    Just look at a satellite map of the world’s carbon emissions. Turns out, developed nations are not the big emitters, though there are hot spots in China — which is very arguably a developing nation.
    http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/10/20091030_ibuki_e.html
    And this is *not* new news, just rather intentionally overlooked.

  2. Let’s actually start with the idea that CAGW is a scam and there is nothing to be agreed upon as far as carbon is concerned.

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