Carbon emissions are more than countries are reporting: study

FILE PHOTO: Cars move on a road during a day with polluted air, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Beijing, China February 13, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists said on Monday they have detected a large gap, equal to about what the United States emits annually, between the amount of climate-warming emissions that countries report and the amount that independent models say reaches the atmosphere.

The gap of about 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year arises not because any country is doing anything wrong. Rather, it is due to differences between scientific methods used in national inventories that countries report under the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and methods used by international models.