China has been hammered for being one of the chief causes for Global Warming -- but new findings indicate they're not pumping out nearly as much CO2 as thought.
Is China getting blasted over Global Warming more than it should be? A new study seems to suggest that’s the case.
The paper accuses international organizations such as the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) is overestimating China’s emissions by as much as 14 percent, according to a Financial Express report.
That’s a big finding considering the fact that important climate change meetings will be held in Paris in December to hash out what should be done to curb carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which are blamed for causing the planet to warm which would result in the melting of the polar ice caps, global flooding, increasingly violent storms, famines, mass extinctions, and a host of other problems.
The researchers faulted the way the organization calculated its data using default conversation rates that shouldn’t be applied to China. The study was published in the journal Nature this week.
China has promised that it would bring emissions to a peak in 2030 but wasn’t very clear on how much CO2 the country is producing as a whole, and what that figure would look like in about 15 years.
Therefore, scientists have had to estimate, coming up with a figure of about 9 to 10 billion tonnes, with forecasts for 2030 falling within a wide range between 11 and 20 billion tonnes.
Dabo Guan, who is the chair of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia and one of the authors of the study, said according to the report that it’s difficult to estimate China’s actual emissions due to the lack of any accurate baseline. However, the researchers are pretty sure EDGAR is overestimating Chinese emissions rates because they are using the wrong conversation rates.
Guan said his paper is more accurate because it takes fuel quality into consideration, something that wasn’t available in other estimates. As a result, 2013 carbon emissions for China probably stood at about 9.13 billion tons, which is much lower than EDGAR figures.
Further, the authors of the study found that after looking at 600 samples from domestic mines, the recommended default emission factor of 0.713 tonnes of carbon for every tonne of coal produced shouldn’t apply to China — instead, it should be about 0.518 tonnes.
Estimates also indicate that Chian produced 2.9 gigatonnes less carbon dioxide than had been previously thought between 2000 and 2013.
Beijing’s last official number was all the way back in 2005, when the government estimated that there was approximately 7.47 billion tonnes of emissions. They are expected to submit a figure for 2010 next year.
This, of course, doesn’t let China completely off the hook when it comes to Global Warming. China still is the largest polluter in the entire world, just not quite as much of a polluter as had been previously thought if the study is accurate. But it is likely to give China some ammo as it heads into the Paris talks to push some of the burden onto other nations.
