Reacción a "Reactions to the results of the Global Carbon Budget 2022 report"

The Global Carbon Project 2022 paper by Friedlingstein et al. represents one of the most comprehensive studies of trends and sources of greenhouse gas emissions detected in recent decades, with a valuable analysis of recent trends in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and so far in 2022. The work is the result of an extensive collaboration of top scientists involved in energy, emissions and climate modelling. The study finds no evidence that emissions have declined in recent decades. The main findings highlight that the pandemic has been a very brief hiatus in the trend of annual emission increases, which have skyrocketed more than ever after confinement. This makes the target of no more than 1.5°C of warming compared to the pre-industrial era agreed at the 2015 COP in Paris increasingly unattainable.

Analysis of the major emitting countries shows that the large increase in coal consumption and emissions generation is due to China, while the increases in emissions in the United States and the European Union are mainly due to increased use of gas. Oil remains the most important source of emissions and dominates global growth in fossil fuel use.

The terrestrial carbon sink continues to grow in response to rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, which have been increasing steadily over the last thirty years, but show large fluctuations from year to year. Land use changes are very dramatic and there are three countries, Congo, but especially Brazil and Indonesia, whose deforestation accounts for 50% of the emissions due to this source (land use changes).

The study provides a great deal of detail to give a global picture of a growing climate emergency in which the effects of individual countries' measures and strategies to limit emissions are barely discernible. The study contains a small imbalance or imbalance between total emissions and total sinks, which should be equal in amounts of CO₂, which represents an area of active research.