From Peter Bergamaschi, European Commission Directorate General Joint Research Centre
Referring to our study “Inverse modelling of national and European CH4 emissions using the atmosphere zoom model TM5″ by P. Bergamaschi et al (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol 5, p 2431), Fred Pearce reports that “Now two teams that have monitored concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere say they have convincing evidence that the figures by many countries are wrong, especially for methane. Among the worst offenders are the UK…and France…” (24 June, p 10). This statement, however, is not supported by our work.
Our study suggests that the methane emissions of some European countries could be higher than the official values reported to the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but for other countries the emissions are lower and the total emissions of all 15 EU countries (those that were members before 2004) were found to be close to the UNFCCC values.
As comprehensively discussed in our paper, however, it is very important to consider the large uncertainties in both approaches.
The uncertainties of the methane emissions reported to UNFCCC are estimated at 20 to 50 per cent. However, our approach also has significant uncertainties. Our study primarily demonstrated the feasibility of setting up a verification system. To reduce the uncertainties in the “top-down” estimates we need a much denser network of atmospheric measurements and the application of different, independent atmospheric models.
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Ispra, Italy
