2018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #37

A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week.

Editor's Pick

Paris Conundrum: How to Know How Much Carbon Is Being Emitted? 

Emissions-Industrial-Complex_Oberhausen-Germany-2017

An industrial complex in Oberhausen, Germany in January 2017. LUKAS SCHULZE/GETTY

As climate negotiators consider rules for verifying commitments under the Paris Agreement, they will have to confront a difficult truth: There currently is no reliably accurate way to measure total global emissions or how much CO2 is coming from individual nations.   

Will we be able to verify the Paris climate accord? Right now science is not up to the task, say the people in charge of assessing our annual emissions of CO2. There is, they say, no sure way of independently verifying whether national governments are telling the truth about their own emissions or of knowing by how much global anthropogenic emissions are actually increasing.

And that is distinctly alarming, given the contradiction between reports that anthropogenic emissions have stopped rising and atmospheric measurements showing that annual increases in CO2 levels have reached record levels.

Climate negotiators are committed to concluding a rule book for implementing the Paris Agreement at their next annual conference, in Katowice, Poland, in December. Central to that will be an agreed plan to monitor, report, and verify the pledges made by almost 200 countries.

Paris Conundrum: How to Know How Much Carbon Is Being Emitted? by Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360, Sep 10, 2018 


Links posted on Facebook

Sun Sep 9, 2018

Mon Sep 10, 2018

Tue Sep 11, 2018

Wed Sep 12, 2018

Thu Sep 13, 2018

Fri Sep 14, 2018

Sat Sep 15, 2018

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 15 September, 2018


Creative Commons License The Skeptical Science website by Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.