Historical emissions

Source of Data

Historical regional emissions data comes from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC). Note the individual country data were summed for JCM regions (CDIACs regions are slightly different).
  • CDIAC website

    Historical regional GDP and Energy data is from RIVM's IMAGE model, from 1970 only.

  • See About the regions

    Need link to ref and re hist popn data

    The original data is compressed to one byte per number

  • See Load-Data module

    Interesting Observations

    If you make a plot of Emissions ("what" menu) / Population ("per" menu), you can observe some well known historical events as sudden changes in the curves:
  • Economic depressions in 1929 (Wall street crash) and 1979 (related to OPEC oil price rise)
  • rapid economic growth in 1960s
  • "great leap forward" in China 1950s
  • burning oil wells in Middle East during 1991 Gulf war
  • collapse of the USSR leading to closure of heavy industry (also in east europe)
  • effect of weather variation on renewable energy supply (wind and hydro) in Denmark.