The Present, Past, and Future Contributions to Global Warming of CO2 Emissions from Fuels

The objective of this paper is to emphasize theresponsibility of developed countries to implement the Climate Convention, as well as the role ofdeveloping countries in CO2 emissions controlwhile sustaining their rights to increase energyconsumption per capita during the development process. Itis shown that the growth in CO2$ emissions fromfossil fuel consumption in North America, excludingMexico, from 1990 to 1996 was 3.7 times higherthan that of Latin America in absolute terms. Thecumulative contribution to global warming, expressedas the mass of the gas multiplied by time (GtCy), can becalculated as the integration of the atmosphericconcentration of the emitted gas along time, witha weight function in the integrand to simulate theclimate response. To simulate climate response,we used the superposition of exponential decay functions with different decay constants. Thehistorical contributions of the OECD countries,the Eastern European countries and theex-Soviet Union, and from all developingcountries are considered. The future contributionsare computed in three scenarios. All of them showthat emissions from Non-Annex I countrieswill become higher than those of Annex I countriessoon after 2010, while the curves of atmosphericconcentration will cross one another later, not muchbefore 2050, and the respective contributions toglobal temperature increase will cross about 2090.