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Achieving atmospheric verification of CO2 emissions

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 416–417 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 13 November 2017

arising from G. P. Peters Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0013-9 (2017)

When will CO2 emission reductions first be clearly detectible in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2? Answering this question requires a proper protocol that achieves detection power while controlling false detections in the presence of natural variability.

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Fig. 1: The ACC detection protocol.
Fig. 2: Probability that a detection will occur on or before every given year for BAU and R0 scenarios using ACC as the detection criterion.
Fig. 3: Modelled ACC trajectories for BAU and R0 scenarios.

Data availability

All data are publicly available at https://github.com/ArminUCSD/CO2detect-Rcode.

Code availability

R code for the current study is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ArminUCSD/CO2detect-Rcode.

References

  1. Nisbet, E. Emissions control needs atmospheric verification. Nature 433, 683 (2005).

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  2. Peters, G. P. et al. Towards real-time verification of CO2 emissions. Nat. Clim. Change 7, 848–850 (2017).

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Victor for useful discussions. R.F.K. thanks the Oxford Martin School for hosting a sabbatical that helped to support this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biostatistics and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    Armin Schwartzman

  2. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    Ralph F. Keeling

Authors
  1. Armin Schwartzman
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  2. Ralph F. Keeling
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Contributions

A.S. and R.K. jointly conceptualized the detection protocol and wrote the manuscript. A.S. obtained the data, developed the algorithm, wrote the software, conducted simulations and performed the data analysis.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Armin Schwartzman.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Yi Yin and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Explanation of methods and supplementary analysis results.

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Schwartzman, A., Keeling, R.F. Achieving atmospheric verification of CO2 emissions. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 416–417 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0735-y

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