China carbon emissions lower than previously thought

In 2013, for example, China’s total carbon emissions were 14% less than the figures used by the UN’s panel of experts tasked with providing the scientific framework for global climate talks, the research showed.

More than 190 nations intend to broker a new agreement in Paris in December to limit future emissions and avert the worst effects of global warming.

Global organizations could be overestimating carbon emissions from China due to some issues related to the calculation of the data, a study suggests. China struck a pact with the United States in 2014, pledging to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and increase its use of clean energy to around 20 percent of its total energy production by 2030.

Researchers suggested that none of the previous studies that taken this into consideration despite the fact that China is one of the major consumers of coal.

“Since China’s climate commitments are based on this data, it’s crucial that these challenges are recognised and the country’s capacity to account for its emissions strengthened”, Li said.

The researchers analyzed the coal used in China, which accounts for about 80 percent of Chinese emissions.

But when scientists tested the types of coal actually being burned in China, they found they produced 40% less carbon than had been assumed.

While China used 10 percent more energy between 2000 and 2012 than the country’s national statistics claim, the fossil fuels it burned may have emitted 40 percent fewer emissions than those previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the study concludes.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the total energy consumption in China was 10 per cent higher between 2000 and 2012 than reported in the country’s national statistics.

Confusion over the types of coal being burned in Chinese power stations has caused a significant overestimation of the country’s carbon emissions. Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at UEA. She said there were a lot of uncertainties in Chinese data, especially given discrepancies between national and provincial figures.

“We measured thousands of samples of coal from mines across China, and found that the carbon content of the coal being burned in China is actually much lower than what has been assumed in previous estimates of emissions”, Steven J. Davis, a greenhouse gas scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the authors, said in emailed answers to questions.

Zhu Liu and colleagues reassessed Chinas carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the production of cement between 1950 and 2013 using new measurements of emission factors (the amount of carbon oxidized per unit of fuel consumed) and updated energy consumption data.

But whatever you think of China’s ambitions, the lower estimate of past emissions won’t make fulfilling them any easier. “The strong message here is that as we refine our estimates of carbon emissions we get closer to an accurate picture of what is going on and we can improve our climate projections and better inform policy on climate change.”.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have continued rising globally, and the study doesn’t address how its results square with those increasing carbon emissions, Trenberth said. China produces more than half of global production of steel and cement. Altogether, our revised estimate of Chinas CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production is 2.49 gigatonnes of carbon (2 standard deviations = ±7.3 per cent) in 2013, which is 14 per cent lower than the emissions reported by other prominent inventories.

Read the abstract and get the paper here.