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Carbon accounting —
China emitted a little less greenhouse gas than we thought
New estimate covering 2000-2013 comes in 13 percent lower.
Scott K. Johnson - Aug 21, 2015 6:52 pm UTC
81 with 34 posters participating
As a rapidly emerging economy with over four times the population of the US, China is playing an increasingly large role in the story of climate change. That makes trends in energy production there rather important. Unfortunately, Chinese emissions data aren't the best, leaving significant error bars and discrepancies between different estimates.
A new study led by Zhu Liu went back over data covering 2000 to 2013 to pull together something a little more reliable. The study concludes that China emitted less greenhouse gas than we thought.
Instead of relying on iffy energy consumption data, the researchers went back to the production of coal, oil, and gas in China, and to imports and exports. They came up with a number that was actually a little higher than the Chinese government's national estimate.
However, you also have to know something about the characteristics of those fuels in order to guess how much CO2 was produced by burning them. Very little data had been collected on Chinese coal, in particular. Using measurements of things like the carbon content and heating value of coal from many Chinese mines, they found that the values used for the calculations in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were much too high.
Cement production accounts for around eight percent of Chinese CO2 emissions, so the researchers took a close look at that, too, finding that cement production was a little more efficient than IPCC estimates.
Added together, this put Chinese emissions between 2000 and 2013 around 13 percent lower than estimates like the IPCC's, meaning China emitted almost three gigatons of carbon less than we thought. For comparison, that's equivalent to about one percent of the amount the IPCC estimated we can still emit before warming past the 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial limit.
Nature, 2015. DOI: 10.1038/nature14677 (About DOIs).
Scott K. Johnson Scott has written about geoscience and energy at Ars as a freelancer since 2011.
Email scott.johnson@arstechnica.com // Twitter @SJOnEarth
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