Al Gore’s climate watchdog spots rogue emissions | Science | AAAS
At U.N. meeting #COP28 #ClimateTrace nonprofit reveals gaps in countries’ greenhouse gas inventories using satellites and AI
"This week, at the United Nations’s annual climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), countries are presenting those emissions inventories to show whether they have made progress on promised cuts.
Yet the figures are often misleading, according to Climate Trace, an independent watchdog that is tracking emissions based on new kinds of satellite data, together with artificial intelligence (AI). Its latest assessment, released today, shows that in 2021 Russia left out greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.5 billion tons of CO₂ and the United States missed 400 million tons, much of it driven by CO₂ emissions from oil and gas operations. Overall that year, among wealthy nations required to report to the U.N., Climate Trace estimates 3 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent gases went unreported—some 5% of total global emissions. […]
Backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Climate Trace is a coalition of nonprofits and academics that made headlines 2 years ago with its first analysis of 72,000 of the world’s largest greenhouse gas sources. Its newest assessment looks at 352 million greenhouse gas sources. […]
For Gore, Climate Trace fulfills a dream he laid out in a 1998 speech at the California Science Center, when he called for a “digital Earth.” To monitor how humans are changing the planet, he called for the “automatic interpretation of imagery, the fusion of data from multiple sources, and intelligent agents that could find and link information.”
#CO2Monitoring
https://www.science.org/content/article/al-gore-s-climate-watchdog-spots-rogue-emissions