Pretis Felix, Roser Max
Department of Economics, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
INET at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Energy (Oxf). 2017 Sep 15;135:718-725. doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.06.119.
The wide spread of projected temperature changes in climate projections does not predominately originate from uncertainty across climate models; instead it is the broad range of different global socio-economic scenarios and the implied energy production that results in high uncertainty about future climate change. It is therefore important to assess the observational tracking of these scenarios. Here we compare these socio-economic scenarios created in both 1992 and 2000 against the recent observational record to investigate the coupling of economic growth and fossil-fuel CO emissions. We find that global emission intensity (fossil fuel CO emissions per GDP) rose in the first part of the 21st century despite all major climate projections foreseeing a decline. Proposing a method to disaggregate differences between scenarios and observations in global growth rates to country-by-country contributions, we find that the relative discrepancy was driven by unanticipated GDP growth in Asia and Eastern Europe, in particular in Russia and China. The growth of emission intensity over the 2000s highlights the relevance of unforeseen local shifts in projections on a global scale.
气候预测中预计的温度变化广泛分布，其主要并非源于气候模型间的不确定性；相反，是广泛多样的全球社会经济情景以及隐含的能源生产导致了未来气候变化的高度不确定性。因此，评估这些情景的观测跟踪情况很重要。在此，我们将1992年和2000年创建的这些社会经济情景与近期的观测记录进行比较，以研究经济增长与化石燃料二氧化碳排放的耦合关系。我们发现，尽管所有主要气候预测都预计会下降，但21世纪上半叶全球排放强度（单位GDP的化石燃料二氧化碳排放量）仍有所上升。通过提出一种方法，将全球增长率情景与观测值之间的差异分解为各国的贡献，我们发现相对差异是由亚洲和东欧，特别是俄罗斯和中国未预期到的GDP增长所驱动的。21世纪头十年排放强度的增长凸显了全球范围内预测中未预见的局部变化的相关性。
