Correcting the flawed UN-IPCC’s climate change accounting methodology – meet “emissions-based effective radiative forcing (ERF) “

From this paper here:

“Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy”.

Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop

Published 11 March 2025 • © 2025 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Environmental Research Letters, Volume 20, Number 4Citation Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop 2025 Environ. Res. Lett. 20 044008DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f2

Here is the Abstract:

Greenhouse gas accounting conventions were first devised in the 1990's to assess and compare emissions.

Several assumptions were made when framing conventions that remain in practice, however recent advances offer potentially more consistent and inclusive accounting of greenhouse gases.

We apply these advances, namely: consistent gross accounting of CO₂ sources; linking land use emissions with sectors; using emissions-based effective radiative forcing (ERF) rather than global warming potentials to compare emissions; including both warming and cooling emissions and including loss of additional sink capacity.

We compare these results with conventional accounting and find that this approach boosts perceived carbon emissions from deforestation, and finds agriculture, the most extensive land user, to be the leading emissions sector and to have caused 60% (32%–87%) of ERF change since 1750.

We also find that fossil fuels are responsible for 18% of ERF, a reduced contribution due to masking from cooling co-emissions.

5We test the validity of this accounting and find it useful for determining sector responsibility for present-day warming and for framing policy responses, while recognising the dangers of assigning value to cooling emissions, due to health impacts and future warming.”

The paper is discussed in this 16-minute video:

A controversial new paper challenges established emissions accounting criteria.

“Fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal are the biggest drivers of atmospheric heating, right? Well, maybe not! New research is challenging that long held convention, and its conclusions are pretty stark!”

The video starts with Bill Gates belittling the idea that planting trees to absorb CO2 (not carbon). The narrator does not go into the average 25 kg a year removed per tree but does a great job explaining the paper.

Some of the key points are:

The UN-IPCC uses an accounting method and CO2 equivalents of CO2 from other “greenhouse gasses” to come up with approximations of “new carbon”.

Other “new carbon” comes from deforestation – which has been massive since 1750.

Contribution from particulate matter pollution reflected a lot of the sun’s rays back into space, but these have been reduced by anti-pollution measures (e.g. removing sulphur from ocean ging diesel ship fuel) – this pollution, apparently, killed 8-10 million people a year – 10% of global deaths, which is a dubious claim!

The impact of deforestation has a significant impact on the missions of “new carbon” emitted, but the accounting method used by the UN-IPCC only attributes about one third of the effect.

The “new carbon” method used by the UN-IPCC is faulty and can be replaced by using emissions-based effective radiative forcing (ERF) to better capture the amount of “new carbon” emitted.

The contribution from different sectors changes between UN-IPCC accounting and ERF.

UN-IPCC method for “blaming” different sectors:

ERF method

The impact of agriculture (and deforestation to create it) increases from 37% to 60%.

From here:

(100) New study estimates that just 63 out of 1,500 climate policy interventions had any impact on emissions! All done with disregard for the costs. and what might have been done instead

We have this land use change over the 22 years to 2020:

F

A switch of around 100 million hectares between cropland and grazing with changes of 28 million hectares in built-up areas to support an extra 2 billion people (from 6 billion in 1998 to 7.9 billion in 2020).

Here’s a link to an earlier article that Bill Gates (and climate scientists?) have dismissed.

(100) The 3 trillion trees on planet earth absorb twice as much CO2 as is emitted by man – so where is the increase in CO2 coming from? Maybe it’s from propaganda from a Cult?

Bill Gates and the UKs ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) should reconcile how blocking the sun helps with solar panels!

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