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Contributions of individual countries' emissions to climate change and their uncertainty

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Höhne, Niklas Blum, Helcio Fuglestvedt, Jan Skeie, Ragnhild Bieltvedt Kurosawa, Atsushi Matthews, Ben [UCL] Ellermann, Christian

We have compiled historical greenhouse gas emissions and their uncertainties on country and sector level and assessed their contribution to cumulative emissions and to global average temperature increase in the past and for a the future emission scenario. We find that uncertainty in historical contribution estimates differs between countries due to different shares of greenhouse gases and time development of emissions. Although historical emissions in the distant past are very uncertain, their influence on countries' or sectors' contributions to temperature increase is relatively small in most cases, because these results are dominated by recent (high) emissions. For relative contributions to cumulative emissions and temperature rise, the uncertainty introduced by unknown historical emissions is larger than the uncertainty introduced by the use of different climate models. The choice of different parameters in the calculation of relative contributions is most relevant for countries that are different from the world average in greenhouse gas mix and timing of emissions. The choice of the indicator (cumulative GWP weighted emissions or temperature increase) is very important for a few countries (altering contributions up to a factor of 2) and could be considered small for most countries (in the order of 10%). The choice of the year, from which to start accounting for emissions (e. g. 1750 or 1990), is important for many countries, up to a factor of 2. 2 and on average of around 1. 3. Including or excluding land-use change and forestry or non-CO2 gases changes relative contributions dramatically for a third of the countries (by a factor of 5 to a factor of 90). Industrialised countries started to increase CO2 emissions from energy use much earlier. Developing countries' emissions from land-use change and forestry as well as of CH4 and N2O were substantial before their emissions from energy use. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès restreint
Publication date 2011
Language Anglais
Journal information "Climatic Change : an interdisciplinary, international journal devoted to the description, causes and implications of climatic change" - Vol. 106, no. 3, p. 359-391 (2011)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Springer Netherlands
e-issn 1573-1480
issn 0165-0009
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SST/ELI/ELIC - Earth & Climate
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Bibliographic reference Höhne, Niklas ; Blum, Helcio ; Fuglestvedt, Jan ; Skeie, Ragnhild Bieltvedt ; Kurosawa, Atsushi ; et. al. Contributions of individual countries' emissions to climate change and their uncertainty. In: Climatic Change : an interdisciplinary, international journal devoted to the description, causes and implications of climatic change, Vol. 106, no. 3, p. 359-391 (2011)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/163464