Many Countries Don’t Accurately Report Emissions
By Paul Homewood
Electricity generation in China and India, and oil and gas production in the US, have produced the biggest increases in global greenhouse gas emissions since 2015, when the Paris climate agreement was signed, new data has shown.
Emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, have also risen, despite more than 100 countries signing up to a pledge to reduce the gas, according to data published on Sunday by the Climate Trace project.
The data shows that countries and companies are failing to report their emissions accurately, despite obligations to do so under the Paris agreement. More than 190 countries have been meeting in Dubai since Thursday in an attempt to put the world on track to meet the Paris goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
At the core of the Cop28 UN climate summit in Dubai is a process known as the “global stocktake” – an assessment of progress towards meeting the emissions cuts needed to stay within the 1.5C limit. Many countries, however, have failed to make updates.
I am amazed anybody seriously thought that countries like China would ever bother to report their emissions accurately.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
What a surprise (not).
Who is surprised that the Goracle created group says this?
Oh, the link photo showed a stack with a big plume turning black. Typical propaganda photo of water droplets (cloud stuff) photoed to look like pollution. It says don’t believe all that follows.
COP28 Nothing achieved over 28/29 years, No reduction in CO2 emissions, just cancel the rest of COP28 and get everyone home. They are just wasting every ones time. The best thing the delegates can do is not have any more meetings, think of the saving in flight associated emissions.
I propose to abandon the Paris agreement seconded by Sultan Al Jaber Cop28 President.
In my Dreams
No, we don’t want them back here where they might actually do something. At least COP28 gets them out of the way for a fortnight.
“Emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide….”
This claim pops up regularly and is based, aiui, on laboratory tests carried out in a dry atmosphere. However methane’s absorption spectrum is heavily overlapped by that of water vapour which is present in the real atmosphere at concentrations typically 10 – 20,000 times that of methane.
So how can methane have any effect on temperatures?
Good point
Especially when it is only 0.000175% of the atmosphere!
See Wijngaarden & Happer – Methane and Climate.
For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing at the tropopause, per added CH4 molecule, is about 30 times larger than the forcing per added carbon-dioxide (CO2) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of theabsorption band of the abundant greenhouse gas, CO2. But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.3 ppm/year (ppm = part per million), is about 300 times larger than the rate of increase of CH4 molecules, which has been around 0.0076 ppm/year since the year 2008. So the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide. The net forcing increase from CH4 and CO2 increases is about 0.05 W m−2 year−1. Other things being equal, this will cause a temperature increase of about 0.012 C year−1. Proposals to place harsh restrictions on methane emissions because of warming fears are not justified by facts.
Click to access Methane-PaperREV1-Jan.-17-2019.pdf
Idau: many thanks for flagging up that paper and the link.
I’ll take a look and see if it answers the point about the effect of water vapour. Since the excerpt you posted talks about the tropopause, it may be that, at such altitude, there’s little or no water vapour.
You can never trust any dictatorship
And not many governments of “so called” democratic countries either.
Paul can I ask that you to message me offline so I send you the latest Wildlife Trust email that has caused me to resign my membership.
Any evidence to back that claim up? Western democracies are accountable and whilst they may fudge things they won’t be telling outright lies.
Er….seriously Mr Guy-Johnson?? Your part namesake the lying oaf did nothing but tell lies. As did a certain Sir Tony Liar. And we have Sushi telling us that the dumping of proper cars is being pushed back 5 years and the public will decide what they buy but last week the SI was issued that imposes fines on car manufacturers from January if they don’t sell more battery cars. That looks very much like a lie to me. And his bimbo Coutinho, when increasing the amount taxpayers must pay for new windmills, said it will make our bills lower when nowhere in the world does price reduce with more wind – another lie.
If the Guardian told me the sky was blue, I would go outside to check!
One of the key problems with the whole COP process, including especially the much-lauded Paris Agreement, is that it provides for countries to self-certify their emissions (of course another substantial problem is that the whole process is not legally binding and there are no sanctions for non-compliance). I wrote about the self-certification and related problems here:
Of course it is just an ‘agreement’ as opposed to a binding Treaty.
‘Satellite tracking data shows many countries and firms do not provide accurate figures’
Gamecock, a retired efficiency expert (among other skills), asks why anybody needs to report anything! If you can get by satellite, what is the purpose of the reporting requirement?
As far as I can see, no country can actually “measure its carbon dioxide emissions” That would require a CO2 monitor on every single chimney and exhaust pipe in the country that is emitting the stuff. So what we get instead is modelling of the consumption of oil, coal, wood, and natural gas and then estimation of the CO2 emissions. The scope for fiddling this process is immense, because the models will be full of assumptions, and you can make a model come up with any output you want by “adjusting” these.
When the infamous PM May committed us to net zero by 2050, I naively assumed that we would demonstrate this by such fiddling of the models. I hadn’t bargained for our virtue-signalling politicians – and others with financial stakes in “green” technology – being determined to “lead the world” in CO2 emission reductions.
Then, once they accept this modeled estimate of CO2 emissions by humans, they use it to estimate nature’s emissions of CO2.
“This much is human, so the rest must be nature.”
If you think measuring human emissions are difficult, imagine measuring nature’s.
CO2 emissions are an estimate, with unknown precision. Significant error is possible.
Question: How much CO2 is emitted by burning 1 pound of dried dung?