On the accumulative contribution of CO2 emission from China to global climate change

A study of the contribution to global climate change from China’s CO₂ emission is conducted using the FIO-ESM v1.0 climate model. A series of sensitivity experiments are performed to identify two kinds of contributions to global climate change of China’s CO₂ emission due to fossil fuel combustion: one is the pure contribution which is the historical climate response from the sensitivity experiment forced only by China’s CO₂ emission, the other is the accumulative contribution which is proposed in this research and defined as the difference of historical climate responses between the experiments forced by all countries’ CO₂ emission and other countries’ CO₂ emission excluding China. The pure contribution approach considers the total CO₂ discharged by China, while the accumulative contribution approach considers not only the discharge amount of China but also the discharge order of China and other countries. The latter is a more realistic approach to quantify the contribution of CO₂ emission to the historical change of atmospheric CO₂ concentration, surface air temperature (SAT), sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice coverage in the Arctic. Model results show that from the accumulative perspective, the ratio of the contribution of CO₂ emission from China for the increase of atmospheric CO₂ concentration, SAT and SST, and the decrease of the sea ice coverage in the Arctic to that from all other countries excluding China varies from 8% to 92%, 5% to 95%, 9% to 91% and 18% to 82%, respectively. Here we take the contribution of China’s CO₂ emission as an example, the contribution of CO₂ emission from any other country or area can be evaluated by the same approach.