Pre-industrial missing carbon and current greenhouse responsibilities

Abstract

In many international discussions of relative national responsibilities for past and current greenhouse gas emissions, the net emissions from human land-use changes, such as deforestation, and other modifications of the biosphere, such as promulgating cattle, are included along with emissions from fossil fuel. Since there has been substantial human management of the global biosphere for at least many hundreds of years, however, unlike fossil fuels, there is little justification of choosing the beginning of the industrial revolution in Europe, e.g., 1800, as the starting point for determining national responsibilities. Because the state of a truly pre-human biosphere is not known, and probably cannot be, no baseline can be established in any one place from which human-initiated departure can be calculated. Consequently, the entire biosphere, no matter how much or little managed by humans, has to be left out of indices of responsibility designed to facilitate global allocation of the cost of climate-change remediation measures. For determining the net atmospheric impact of current and future human modifications of biospheric sources and sinks, on the other hand, some arbitrary recent year can serve.