Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the
first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically
rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China’s CO2
emissions. The independent estimates, rooted in part in
measurements of pollutants both at the sources and in the air,
may be the most accurate totals to date. The resulting figures
offer an unbiased basis on which China might measure its
progress toward its well-publicized CO2 control goals. The
findings were published last week in the journal Atmospheric
Environment. “China’s emissions of CO2 are of central concern in
efforts to combat global climate change,” says lead author Yu
Zhao, a former postdoctoral researcher at SEAS who is now a
professor at the Nanjing University School of the Environment in
China. “But despite all of the attention to China’s CO2
emissions, they’re less well-quantified than mo