New research shows that greenhouse gas emissions from the developed world have dominated the impacts of climate change. Furthermore the developed world carbon dioxide reduction promises would achieve just 1/3 of any warming slowdown, even though they are responsible for more than 2/3 of climate change before 2005.
The new results come from an
international collaboration between researchers from Arctic Centre,
Finland and the College of Global Change and Earth System Science,
Beijing Normal University are published in the scientific journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA (PNAS).
It
is widely recognized that industrial emissions of CO2 are affecting the
earth’s climate in many visible ways – and will do so increasing in
future. There has been much acrimonious argument over responsibility for
climate change; who should pay for damage and how to share
responsibilities for decreasing them in future.
This paper is
first study that seeks to quantify the damage to the earth on the basis
of country-by-country records of emissions. Therefore it is useful in
the climate debate as offering a way of measuring responsibility for
past and future actions.
We used two advanced models (one Chinese
the other from the US) of the whole Earth climate-ice-biological system
to simulate the effects of CO2 emissions from developing countries or
developing countries only and compared them with what has actually
happened with combined emissions. We find that both models suggest about
2/3 of impacts on sea ice, ocean warming, snow cover decrease and
temperature rise is from developed world emissions, even though they
presently account for less than half total CO2 emissions. This is
because they emitted them earlier and the climate system takes many
decades to fully respond.
In the future emission restrictions as
outlined in the international Cancun accord and expected continuation is
important from both developing and developed countries. Both groups
need to make serious mitigation efforts or the temptation will be to
employ risky geoengineering without sufficient research into unintended
consequences.
Figure: CO2 emissions observed from all
countries over the last 160 years compared with those coming from the
developed and developing world countries.
The paper is available at
PNAS web pages.
Contact:
John Moore
Research Professor, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland
Chief Scientist, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Tel. +358 400 194 850
john.moore.bnu(at)gmail.com
John Moore's web page
Further images are available.
ULapland / Arctic Centre