Our analyses are based on energy statistics from the United Nations Statistics Office in New York. When we get energy statistics from them we do our own quality assurance checks and if there are questions or problems with some of the numbers we go back to them and ask that they check numbers and make appropriate corrections. Very rarely do we change numbers that are in their statistics. For the last couple of years we have been aware that there were problems with the data on gas consumption and gas flaring from Norway. We have corresponded with Statistics Norway and with the UN and have asked the UN to check the Norwegian natural gas data. When the data were not corrected we finally decided to simply remove Norway from our data set until it was fixed. In the last week we have received a new data file from the UN in which they update all of the statistics to include 1998. Over the next month we will update all of our files to include 1998. We believe that they have fixed the data for Norway and that when we update the files we will be able to put Norway back into the data set. Thanks for your patience on this one.
Regarding The Netherlands. In order to estimate emissions from each country it is necessary to figure out what to do with petroleum and natural gas that are used for non-fuel purposes such as lubricants, asphalts, and feedstocks for plastics. In our estimate for global total emissions we make an estimate about what fraction of these materials are oxidized each year. Since this is very different in the different countries, we do not try to do this for individual countries Instead we just assume that these materials are not oxidized - that is, our estimates of emissions are only for the fuel uses of petroleum and natural gas and should generally be slightly smaller than the estimates from the US Department of Energy or the International Energy Agency. For this reason also, if you add up the emissions for all countries in our data set you will find that the sum is slightly smaller than the total reported for the world. In most countries this does not make too much difference. The biggest difference is for The Netherlands, a country with a very large petrochemical industry.
I really do not have a good answer for North Korea. I think it is just the problem of getting good data for countries with poor systems for data collection. In fact there are 2 countries for which I believe there is significant error in our data. I believe that our estimate for North Korea is too high and that our estimate for Somalia is too low. But we do not have sufficient information to really understand the data for these two countries.
The bottom line is that I believe there are 4 countries for which our data set has particular problems, and you have successfully recognized 3 of them. I hope that we will have Norway corrected within the next month. We also have it on our work list to try to do better with the non-fuel uses of fossil fuels. I suspect North Korean and Somalia will be problems until their governments stabilize.
Someday soon I hope to visit your lovely country. Several years ago I had planned a trip to Prague. I got as far as Vienna but my mother had an accident and I had to return home without going on to Prague.
Thank you again for your insightful questions. Let me know if I have not provided adequate answers or if other questions arise.
Sincerely, Gregg Marland At 07:49 PM 6/30/01 +0200, you wrote:
Dear Dr. Marland,
I appreciate very much your continuing effort to maintain and improve the
time series of fossil carbon emissions of all countries, as available on
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/
I have employed your data for 1995 for a pair of graphs I use in a
programme on Global warming (written 1998) in our Planetarium.
I comment there ``live'' our obligation to lower the CO2 emissions, as per
capita emissions of Czechia are very high. Just a couple of similar-sized
countries rank even worse.
Today I found another overview of fossil carbon emissions (not considering
cement production) at http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/ , e.g.
Linkname: World Carbon Dioxide Emissions 1999
URL: http://www.eia.doe.gov/iea/tableh1.html
For two countries I usually speak about, the emissions given there are
about twice lower:
for Northern Korea
(I mention it as a prime example of incredible wasting symptomatic for
``an advanced socialist'' country, even worse then in Russia or in our
country before 1990)
and for Norway
(I mention it because of flaring gas at sea)
(I have noticed the Norway data are temporarily missing in your recent
table).
On the other side, eia.doe.gov gives almost double emissions for
Netherlands.
At first I thought either data are _equivalent_ carbon for all emitted
greenhouse gases, but it is not the case.
Have your any idea what could be the reason for these large differences?
with best regards,
Jeník Hollan
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Jan Hollan
N. Copernicus Observatory and Planetarium in Brno
Kraví hora 2, CZ - 616 00 Brno +420 (5) 41 32 12 87
home:
Lipová 19, 602 00 Brno 43 23 90 96
member of the Society for Sustainable Living
and volunteer of the Ecological counselling Veronica
Panská 9, 602 00 Brno, Czechia fax: +420 (5) 42 21 05 61
e-mail: hollan@ped....cz http://astro.sci.muni.cz/pub/hollan
see also http://amper.ped.muni.cz
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PS. the above mentioned graphs are available in Czech as
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/obrazky/black_background/cnt1_w.pdf
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/obrazky/black_background/cnt2_w.pdf
and their raw English source (I modify then by LaTeX) in
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/obrazky/raw/
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Gregg Marland 865-241-4850 phone Environmental Sciences Division 865-574-2232 fax Oak Ridge National Laboratory gum@ornl... Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6335 USA