[sustran] Kyoto promises are nothing but hot air

[Eric.britton]

Kyoto promises are nothing but hot air

http://www.insnet.org/ins_headlines.rxml?cust=1001&id=2963&url=http://ww
w.newscientist.com/article/mg19025574.000-kyoto-promises-are-nothing-but
-hot-air.html
 
MANY governments, including some that claim to be leading the fight
against global warming, are harbouring a dirty little secret. These
countries are emitting far more greenhouse gas than they say they are, a
fact that threatens to undermine not only the shaky Kyoto protocol but
also the new multibillion-dollar market in carbon trading.

Under Kyoto, each government calculates how much carbon dioxide, methane
and nitrous oxide its country emits by adding together estimated
emissions from individual sources. These so-called "bottom-up" estimates
have long been accepted by atmospheric scientists, even though they have
never been independently audited.

Now two teams that have monitored concentrations of greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere say they have convincing evidence that the figures
reported by many countries are wrong, especially for methane. Among the
worst offenders are the UK, which may be emitting 92 per cent more
methane than it declares under the Kyoto protocol, and France, which may
be emitting 47 per cent more.

Peter Bergamaschi of the European Commission Joint Research Centre at
Ispra, Italy, used an alternative "top-down" technique to study
emissions across Europe. His technique is to measure in detail how
concentrations of greenhouse gases vary across the globe. Levels are
generally higher near major sources such as industrial centres, and when
weather conditions trap the pollution. They are lower near natural
"sinks" such as cold areas of ocean. Concentrations can also vary widely
depending on factors such as the weather. Over London, for example,
methane levels vary from 1800 parts per billion (ppb), the global
background level, on windy days to upwards of 3000 ppb when local
emissions from landfills and gas pipelines are trapped by cold night
air.

By measuring these differences and tracking air movements, the
scientists say they can calculate a country's emissions independently of
government estimates. Bergamaschi's calculations suggest that the UK
emitted 4.21 million tonnes of methane in 2004 compared to the 2.19
million tonnes it declared, while France emitted 4.43 million tonnes
compared to the 3.01 million tonnes it declared. Methane is an extremely
powerful greenhouse gas. While it persists in the atmosphere for only
one-tenth as long as CO2, its immediate warming effect, tonne for tonne,
is around 100 times greater. According to some estimates, methane is
responsible for a third of current global warming, and reductions in
methane emissions may be the quickest and cheapest way of slowing
climate change.

Bergamaschi's figures are based on real atmospheric measurements that
integrate emissions over large areas. While he admits that they cannot
be entirely accurate, they are free from some of the sources of error
that apply to national declared figures, which are based on uncertain
extrapolations from sites such as landfills, whose emissions are highly
variable.

During the course of Bergamaschi's study, the German government revised
its estimate of national methane emissions upwards by some 70 per cent,
placing it close to his estimate. The British and French governments
continue to stick with their low estimates. Bergamaschi told New
Scientist that the UK appears to be badly under-reporting methane
bubbling out of landfill sites, while France's emissions seem to be
generally under-reported. On the other hand, Ireland and Finland may be
overestimating emissions from peat bogs.

Bergamaschi's calculations are supported by a similar study led by Euan
Nisbet of Royal Holloway University of London, who is a member of the
Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW), a network of atmospheric scientists
organised by the UN's World Meteorological Organization. Nisbet
estimates that methane emissions in the London area in the late 1990s
were 40 to 80 per cent higher than declared by the government at the
time.
 
Both scientists believe that countries outside Europe are also likely to
be under-reporting their emissions, and that the problem is global. "We
know the total global emissions well enough, but individual national
numbers may be badly out. Some are too big and some are too small,"
Nisbet says.

In the past, he says, estimates of greenhouse gas emissions were
inaccurate simply because of the difficulty of measuring them, but that
may have changed. "Now that money enters the picture, with the Kyoto
protocol rules and carbon trading, so also can fraud. There will be an
incentive to under-report emissions." Nisbet, Bergamaschi and other
scientists now want to create a global system for auditing emissions
claims by directly measuring concentrations of greenhouse gases in the
air.

Most existing monitoring sites are intended to measure background gas
levels in clean ocean and mountain air. The oldest and most famous is on
top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, where US researcher David Keeling first
proved half a century ago that CO2 levels in the air were rising. The
network now run by GAW is far from comprehensive: it includes just one
station in China, sited on the relatively unpolluted Tibetan plateau,
while India's sole site is in the unpolluted mountainous Ladakh region.
There is no continuous monitoring in inland Africa, and only a few
stations in South America and south-east Asia. Yet these regions support
more than half the world's population and are responsible for a growing
proportion of its greenhouse gas emissions.

Some western governments, say the scientists, have been reluctant to set
up permanent monitoring stations. "Of all the G8 nations, the UK does
the least," says Nisbet, who runs the only permanent monitoring point in
England, from his lab near Egham, on the south-western fringes of
London. The longest-running CO2 monitoring point on British soil, in the
Shetland Islands, was run by Australia till 2001 and is now funded by
Germany. France runs a network of monitors on its remote island
territories round the world, but the UK government refuses pleas for it
to do likewise on territories such as Ascension Island or South Georgia
in the remote South Atlantic, or the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean.
The European Union recently shut down its pioneering programme of
measuring atmospheric methane across the continent. "Ironically, the
best monitoring is done by the US and Australia, which are both in
denial over Kyoto," Nisbet says.

The GAW scientists say that a global greenhouse gas monitoring network
should provide open access to the information it collects. Only then,
they say, will it be possible to do independent calculations to discover
who is emitting what, and test which countries are complying with Kyoto
and making accurate claims about their emissions. Until such a network
is in place, it will be all too easy for nations such as the UK to talk
green while acting dirty.

>From issue 2557 of New Scientist magazine, 22 June 2006, page 10

Sins of Omission?

The most alarming failure of greenhouse gas emissions reporting is
thought to have occurred in China, the world's second largest emitter.
In the late 1990s, when its economy was growing by 10 per cent a year,
the Chinese government reported a dramatic fall in CO2 emissions to the
UN climate change convention. It declared that, after a long period of
steep increases, emissions had fallen from 911 million tonnes of carbon
a year in 1996 to 757 million tonnes in 2000, a drop of 17 per cent.

China said the fall in emissions was achieved by burning less coal, an
assessment it based on a decline in coal production. Some analysts
praised the country for using coal more efficiently, but that picture
was called into doubt when declared coal production and emissions
estimates resumed their fast rise. Estimates for 2004 put China's CO2
emissions above 1200 million tonnes.

Most analysts now conclude that the drop in emissions was entirely
illusory. It coincided with major changes in the organisation of the
Chinese coal industry, which replaced state targets with a market
system. "Emissions figures before 1996 were inflated because mine
officials had production targets to meet, and declared they had met them
when they had not," one analyst told New Scientist. By 2000, this effect
had gone, and "subsequent figures for CO2 emissions are probably more
accurate as a result." While the Chinese government may not have
intentionally misled the international community over its emissions at
the time, the incident reveals how easy it could be to fiddle official
figures.



Source: New
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025574.000-kyoto-promises-are-n
othing-but-hot-air.html>  Scientist

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