Global Warming – CO2 Emission Trends
I am interested in the question of what future global CO2 emissions will be and how the IPCC forecasts them. I think the IPCC has exaggerated likely future emission trends. This conclusion is based on empirical work (coauthored with Mark Strazicich and Junsoo Lee) which is undergoing the long, slow journal review process. The Fraser Forum article and the Post op-ed give the gist of the argument, but the article under review goes into a whole lot of econometric detail and provides a theoretical growth model to explain why the empirical results make sense, and why settling the related issue of “convergence” will be important for constraining future emission forecasts.
Spring 2010: The paper continues to bump along. We spent 18 months going through 3 rounds at one top journal, but there was one (of 3) referees who just hated the paper and would not allow it to be published, despite the fact that we rebutted all his or her objections. Then we went through 3 rounds with another journal, and in the process of dealing with the new referee comments we've expanded the paper quite a bit. (Next they'll tell us it's too long.) We added a 3rd author, Junsoo Lee, who helped us with the Bayesian forecasting section. The last round took 15 months to get referee replies, and the editor ended up adding a new referee who insisted on rejecting the paper based on the claim that our results couldn't be replicated. We got the referee's code and found the error in it, but the editor wouldn't reopen the matter, so it's now under review somewhere else.
Spring 2010: The paper continues to bump along. We spent 18 months going through 3 rounds at one top journal, but there was one (of 3) referees who just hated the paper and would not allow it to be published, despite the fact that we rebutted all his or her objections. Then we went through 3 rounds with another journal, and in the process of dealing with the new referee comments we've expanded the paper quite a bit. (Next they'll tell us it's too long.) We added a 3rd author, Junsoo Lee, who helped us with the Bayesian forecasting section. The last round took 15 months to get referee replies, and the editor ended up adding a new referee who insisted on rejecting the paper based on the claim that our results couldn't be replicated. We got the referee's code and found the error in it, but the editor wouldn't reopen the matter, so it's now under review somewhere else.
- **McKitrick, Ross R., Mark Strazicich and Junsoo Lee (2010) Stationarity of Global Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Implications for Global Warming Scenarios submitted.
- *McKitrick, Ross R. (January 2003) Emission Scenarios and Recent Global Warming Projections Fraser Forum.
- Political 'Science' (National Post, April 4 2002) (graph)
We had an exchange with Bjart Holtsmark about the main results of the paper in 2006 in Environment and Energy, at which time we did not know how delayed eventual publication would be. Since we did not want to break the embargo on our paper by presenting the contents in E&E, we only published a brief reply inviting readers to contact us for the more detailed version. Today (April 17 2010) we got our first request. It's been long enough that the reply needed a re-write, and there's not much point keeping it hidden, so here is the updated version:
