Canada and it's national CO2 target... a joke?

Did you know that Canada signed the Copenhagen Accord in December 2009, thereby committing to reducing its GHG emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020.

What does this means exactly... what will be the impact if Canada manage to do this?

Here's the graph from environment Canada:

Look at the scale on the left side... Wow!  Megatonnes of CO2... that's huge right?

Ok... let's put some perspective on this... 1000 Megatonnes is 1 Gigatonne.. or 1Gt.  So far with me?

According to the IPCC own calculation, you would need 2.12 Gt of CO2 per year to increase the atmospheric content by 1 PPM. 

So the whole of Canada emissions today is around 0.75 Gt, this gives us 0.35 PPM increase per year according to this calculation.  Wow... a big number!  But wait... the target is to reduce by 17% compared to the 2005 level... which is around 621 or 0.621 Gt per year.  Again in PPM this is 0.29 PPM... or a big reduction of 0.06 PPM per year.  The atmosphere today is around 400 PPM... so what is 0.06 PPM difference make?

Let's look at a graph of the CO2 seasonal variation and compare this...

If you zoom in on the seasonal uptake, which is the amount of CO2 the world plants and ocean consume.. it's around 6 PPM in 2014... so nature naturally reduces the CO2 PPM in the atmosphere by a factor of 100 times more every season that what would would achieve if we were to meet the reduction targets.

So this target compared to the amount already in the atmosphere and the natural variability is pretty much in the noise level... right... but how do Canada emissions compared to the world then.

Here's the Global emissions per regions in the world:

The Y axis is in M... this is for each 1M is equal to 1Gt... that's right... 1M is already above the total emissions of the whole of Canada which is 0.75M or 0.75Gt of CO2.

Look at east Asia and pacific region... them alone are emitting 13M or 13Gt... this is like 17 times more that the whole of Canada!

For the whole world, we emit close to 35M or 35Gt of CO2 annually... So Canada is emitting around 2% of global emission... do you think that reducing from 0.75Gt to 0.621Gt per year will make any difference globally?  Probably not! It would actually be a 0.37% reduction per year globally.

Can we calculate the impact on global temperature? Well, according to some theory... we have what is called climate sensitivity numbers... this is how much warming in °C a doubling of CO2 (PPM) will bring to the world...

Here's how this number evolved over the years:

So... the latest studies places this number around or below 2°C... so let us play the alarmist playbook and take the 2°C number for a doubling of CO2...

This is compared to a level of 280 PPM, before the industrial revolution!  Ok... so we have a potential of 2°C of warming for adding 280 PPM.  So for each PPM this is 0.007 °C... and we calculated above that Canada reduction would be by 0.06 PPM... 

Therefore, Canada's efforts to reach this very important target will potentially reduce the global temperature by a whooping... READY!  0.000042 °C per year!  WOW... will we save the world!

But let go a bit further... the world emits 35Gt per year of CO2... so this would be 35/2.12 = 16.5 PPM added every year to the global CO2... if all those numbers are right... right?

But look at the above graph (real measurement data in Hawai)... the red line... here's the section... CO2 is increasing by a bit less than 3 PPM per year... not by 16.5... so where is the 13.5 PPM going?  We see that the earth is capturing around 6 PPM per year... I will leave you think a little about this...

So take all the above number with a grain of salt... meaning that they are probably 2-3 time too much....

In conclusion, if I was the prime minister of Canada... I would not worry too much about all that and for sure would not spend billions on this climate non-sense!