A synthesis of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion

Abstract

Abstract. This synthesis discusses the emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion and cement production. While much is known about these emissions, there is still much that is unknown about the details surrounding these emissions. This synthesis explores our knowledge of these emissions in terms of why there is concern about them; how they are calculated; the major global efforts on inventorying them; their global, regional, and national totals at different spatial and temporal scales; how they are distributed on global grids (i.e., maps); how they are transported in models; and the uncertainties associated with these different aspects of the emissions. The magnitude of emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels has been almost continuously increasing with time since fossil fuels were first used by humans. Despite events in some nations specifically designed to reduce emissions, or which have had emissions reduction as a byproduct of other events, global total emissions continue their general increase with time. Global total fossilfuel carbon dioxide emissions are known to within 10 % uncertainty (95 % confidence interval). Uncertainty on individual national total fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions range from a few percent to more than 50 %. This manuscript concludes that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion continue to increase with time and that while much is known about the overall characteristics of these emissions, much is still to be learned about the detailed characteristics of these emissions.

Is global dimming and brightening in Japan limited to urban areas?

“…The use of population alone as a proxy to infer the air pollution level is under debate (Alpert et al, 2005;Ramanathan et al, 2007;Alpert and Kishcha, 2008;Stanhill and Cohen, 2009;Imamovic et al, 2016). Related are issues associated with the use of population-based proxies to infer CO 2 emissions (for an overview, see Andres et al, 2012), even though CO 2 emissions are not necessar- Around 1955-1960Around 1975-1980Around 1995-2000 Akita Fukuoka Kagoshima 1957 (1) 1977 (1) 1996 (1) 1957 (2) 1977 (2) 1999 (1) 1954 (2) 1977 ( 13979 Around 1955-1960Around 1975-1980Around 1995-2000 Matsumoto Naha Sapporo 1959 (1) 1976 (1) 1995 (1) 1962 (2) 1977 (2) 1997 (1) 1958 (1) 1977 ( Figure 5. Chronological changes in land use surrounding the current and previous sites for the 14 observatories under study (length of the scale bar is 1 km).…”

A multiresolution spatial parameterization for the estimation of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions via atmospheric inversions

“…Pregger et al (2007) showed that two 0.5 • inventories for Western Europe, for 2003, differed at the grid-cell level by 20 %, with a standard deviation of 40 %; at finer resolutions, the disagreement worsened. Sources of errors in inventories are discussed in detail in Andres et al (2012), Raupach et al (2009) and Rayner et al (2010). These uncertainties lead to frequent corrections of sub-national inventories of combustion products (Streets et al, 2006) and model predictions of CO 2 concentrations that disagree with observations locally (Brioude et al, 2012).…”

“…ffCO 2 emissions are the largest net carbon flux at the atmosphere-surface interface (Friedlingstein et al, 2006) and spatially disaggregated (or gridded) ffCO 2 emissions form a critical input into general circulation and integrated assessment models (Andres et al, 2012). An understanding of fossil-fuel emissions is clearly necessary for characterizing the anthropogenic climate impact.…”

“…Gridded inventory estimates are derived from ffCO 2 budgets and produced by a few institutions; see Andres et al (2012) for a list. These budgets are compiled from national and provincial statistics on fossil-fuel production and consumption.…”

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