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Researcher: The US Owes the World $4 Trillion For Trashing the Climate
merbs writes: Climate change wasn't created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed most of the pollution and gone way over their carbon budgets—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So should rich countries pay up? Researcher Damon Matthews has quantified how much historically polluting nations owe their global neighbors—and it's a lot.
Disregard the above, I'm an idiot.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
negative according to the study, since they still havent hit breakpoint.
To be fair, his title was "biased reporting". When the research talks about all nations, and the reporting talks only about the US, that legitimately is biased reporting. Especially when the US doesn't look so extreme compared to the other "climate debt" nations on a per capita basis.
This said, that bias isn't necessarily bad when your audience is from the US. And I say this as somebody who is not from the US, and who went directly to the article to find out how other countries did.
CO2 is fungible. If I burn one tree's worth of coal, I've changed the amount in the active carbon cycle by exactly the same amount as if I burned the tree instead. The only way this isn't true is if the tree was going to burn anyway.
It's true that CO2 is CO2 regardless of the source of the carbon.
But the active carbon cycle consists primarily of the carbon that cycles through the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere on relatively short (geologically speaking) time scales. Since the tree you're burning is part of the biosphere it is already part of the active carbon cycle burning it doesn't change the total carbon in the active cycle, just the location. It then becomes available for other trees to take it up continuing the cycle.
Fossil fuels on the other hand consist of carbon that has not been a part of the active carbon cycle for millions of years (in most cases hundreds of millions of years). Burning fossil fuels releases that carbon increasing the total in the active carbon cycle. Since the balance between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere in the active carbon cycle remains about the same you get an increase in atmospheric CO2, and increase in hydrosphere CO2 (thus ocean acidification) and an increase in the biosphere with more plant growth. Of those three "spheres" the biosphere is probably the most limited since plant growth depends on other things besides the availability of carbon but the balance between the atmosphere and hydrosphere just depends on Henry's Law as modified by Van 't Hoff's equation.