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Climate Science

Globalized carbon emissions

Nature Geoscience volume 1, page 344 (2008)Cite this article

However, the researchers also estimate large uncertainties, on the order of 15–20%, in the Chinese annual trends. Discrepancies between some of the changes announced in the official Chinese statistics are hard to reconcile with current understanding. For example, between 1996 and 2000 a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions was reported, whereas electricity generation, industrial output and gross domestic product were all reported to have increased. In addition, official numbers for emissions in the year 2000 were recently revised upwards by 23%.

Whether China has already overtaken the US in terms of national carbon dioxide emissions in 2004, or will not do so before 2010, is therefore uncertain. But what does an answer to this particular question mean? A comparison of carbon emissions by country is not necessarily informative, when the populations differ by a factor of four. In addition, an estimated fraction of 7–14% of China's carbon dioxide emissions is ultimately outsourced from the US, in the sense that many energy-intensive products that are manufactured in China are eventually consumed in North America. And other western countries import goods from China, too.

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  1. Heike Langenberg
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Langenberg, H. Globalized carbon emissions. Nature Geosci 1, 344 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo219

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