Who is warming the world?

National per capita contributions to global warming. Colours indicate contributions above and below the world average, where read and orange indicate above, and yellow and gree below the world average of 0.11 Celsius per billion people.

The map above shows that the largest contributions to global warming is made by people living in the USA, western Europe, including the UK, Cananda, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, Greenland, Iceland, Brazil, Argentina and many other countries in South America. People from India and China contribute below the global average. The data comes from a paper in Environmental Research Letters, in which the authors put this in a very roundabout way:

We show also that there are vast disparities in both total and per-capita climate contributions among countries, and that across most developed countries, per-capita contributions are not currently consistent with attempts to restrict global temperature change to less than 2 Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

In fact, the Candadian authors obfuscate the issue by producing a map which shows that per unit area of the world’s surface India and China are up there with western Europe and USA among the worst offenders, whereas Canada and Australia are clean as a whistle! It seems like the authors went looking for a criterion by which Canada could be shown to be better than China and India.

As is to be expected, western news media has reported this highly biased map. For extremely slanted news, see here, here, here and here.

Time to remind ourselves: land does not burn oil, people burn oil.