The Present, Past, and Future Contributions to Global Warming of CO sub(2) Emissions from Fuels

• Published in: Climatic change 2001-02, Vol.48 (2-3), p.289-307
• Main Authors: Rosa, L P, Ribeiro, S K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0165-0009; 1573-1480

The objective of this paper is to emphasize the responsibility of developed countries to implement the Climate Convention, as well as the role of developing countries in CO sub(2) emissions control while sustaining their rights to increase energy consumption per capita during the development process. It is shown that the growth in CO sub(2) emissions from fossil fuel consumption in North America, excluding Mexico, from 1990 to 1996 was 3.7 times higher than that of Latin America in absolute terms. The cumulative contribution to global warming, expressed as the mass of the gas multiplied by time (GtCy), can be calculated as the integration of the atmospheric concentration of the emitted gas along time, with a weight function in the integrand to simulate the climate response. To simulate climate response, we used the superposition of exponential decay functions with different decay constants. The historical contributions of the OECD countries, the Eastern European countries and the ex-Soviet Union, and from all developing countries are considered. The future contributions are computed in three scenarios. All of them show that emissions from Non-Annex I countries will become higher than those of Annex I countries soon after 2010, while the curves of atmospheric concentration will cross one another later, not much before 2050, and the respective contributions to global temperature increase will cross about 2090.