Climate – lost in a data fog David Steven
October 11, 2007 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Global system | No comments
Is it just me or are good statistics on climate change ridiculously hard to get hold of?
The natural point of comparison is with development indicators. Want a ranking of where countries sit on the rich/poor continuum? Try the Human Development Index which “measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Data are available for 177 countries and stretch back to 1980. There are oodles of similar indicators.
Or want to know about HIV/AIDS in, say, Mozambique. UNAIDS has stats for 2006 that include:
- Basic facts – number of people living with HIV; prevalence rate; deaths due to AIDS; number of AIDS orphans etc.
- Behavioural data – proportion of men and women who have had casual sex in the past twelve months; who used a condom when they last had casual sex; who had sex before they were fifteen; and who correctly identify ways to prevent HIV.
- Policy data – in particular, how much of its own money a government is spending on the epidemic.
The data are easy to find, easy to read and have been carefully selected. They’re also there for every country in a standard format. Read them and you feel you really know the epidemic.
So, let’s turn to climate change.
A dataset for concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere is not too hard to find, but I am struggling to find a current figure for all greenhouse gases, expressed as a carbon dioxide equivalent. Search for CO2e and you hit a Cantor Fitzgerald trading company and plenty of glossaries, but not the figure itself. (Alex tells me it’s around 455ppm.)
What about emissions? What I’d like to know, for as many countries as possible, are:
- Per capita emissions and trend (perhaps as an average rate of change over a 5-year period).
- Greenhouse gas intensity (how much a country emits to make a dollar of GDP) and trend.
- Annual rate of emissions growth, dating back to at least 1990 (the Kyoto baseline year).
- Climate stabilisation targets that countries have taken on under Kyoto or have set themselves.
EarthTrends gives me per capita emissions, but only to 2003, and only for greenhouse gases separately; a single CO2e figure could be calculated quite easily, but it’s not there. It’s similar for carbon intensity – data to 2002 and no data at all for other greenhouse gases. Getting their data is a pain too. No rankings. Hard to get all a country’s data in one place. And so on.
UNFCC, meanwhile, has data on total CO2e emissions. For countries without Kyoto targets, however, data often stops at 1994. The Kyoto countries make it to 2004.
Wikipedia lists Kyoto obligations and also EU targets for 2012, but I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list of the patchwork of formal and informal commitments countries have taken on. Even the US has a target, to reduce greenhouse gas intensity by 18% between 2002 and 2012.
So…
- Climate data is patchy and often dated…
- …by God, it’s hard to find…
- …and even when you find it, the formatting is terrible. Look again at the HIV/AIDS data – a masterpiece of selection and layout in comparison.
- Rankings are also under-supplied. The US target sounds (even!) less impressive when you see that it produces only a couple of thousand dollars of GDP for each tonne of carbon emitted, putting it 39th on this list, and 4.5 times less efficient than top country, Switzerland.
- We are a million miles (kilometres?) from settling on standard data measures. When a leader says they favour a 550ppm atmospheric ceiling – do they mean carbon or carbon equivalent?
- CO2e, surely, should be the gold standard. What do we need to do to get everyone to accept that?
Look, this is dull but, surely also, a big deal.
Information – like a stable climate – is a global public good. You badly need everyone to be using the same data sources. Even if they disagree, you want them to do so using a common set of facts and concepts (that’s why we have the IPCC).
And that’s before we get to data on the human drivers – the opinions, attitudes, decisions and behaviours on which a low-carbon economy must be built (or not as the case may be). As Alex mentioned earlier, we’re writing a paper on this at the moment for the London Accord.
What do electorates believe and why? What deal on climate are they prepared to accept? Which groups are driving the debate in country? And what influence are they seeking to exert?
Look how illuminating behavioural data are for HIV/AIDS. In Mozambique, 84% of men have had sex with a casual partner in the last year, while only a third of them used a condom the last time they had casual sex. There, in a nutshell, you have the reason why one in six adults are HIV positive.We have nothing as good as this for climate.
There is one consolation though. When so much of this problem seems almost beyond solving, at least this is one deficit that can be quickly, easily and cheaply put right.
Update: Real Climate points out that there are two different CO2 equivalents floating around:
Firstly, it is often used to group together all the forcings from the Kyoto greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O and CFCs), and secondly to group together all forcings (including ozone, sulphate aerosols, black carbon etc.). The first is simply a convenience, but the second is what matters to the planet.
Imagine debating the economy if people used terms like ‘inflation’ or ‘GDP’ to mean completely different things!
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