GREENHOUSE gas emissions in the 1990s could have been
underestimated by billions of tonnes, throwing doubt on some of
the maths behind the Kyoto Protocol, research by Australian and
international scientists suggests. The research team measured
real-world changes in the amount of CO2 building up in the
atmosphere against the amount of gases that each country said it
emitted. And, like a jigsaw puzzle with one or two missing
pieces, the picture did not quite match. ''The simplest
explanation is there has been an underestimate in the accounting
of about 7 per cent through that early period in the 1990s,''
said the lead researcher, Roger Francey, an honorary fellow at
the CSIRO. ''The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't
reflect the reported emissions. This may be because the
methodology for getting national emissions was far less
developed than today, and only really developed for a few
countries, so they were relying much more on estimates.'' If
confirmed, the findings would carry some potentially good new