Monitoring the carbon budget: Real-time verification of CO2 emissions
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International agreements to reduce CO_2 emissions necessitate that nations will have to commit to drastic reductions in their emissions in the near future. However, CO_2 emissions are reported by individual nations and cannot be easily verified by the global community. This implies the need to develop reliable methods to verify reported CO_2 emissions. This paper puts forth a simple statistical method to do this. In particular, we propose to use Earth system data on CO_2 sinks, measured independently of reported emissions, to monitor, sequentially in real-time, whether the Earth system data are compatible with reported CO_2 emissions.
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