Environments and People - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 40

Table 2-1 CO 2 Emissions: Selected Country Rankings 2006
(Rankings out of 210 countries)

Annual CO 2 Emissions

Country Rank (in 1,000s of metric tons) % of Total Gl obal Emissions

China 1. 6,103,493 21.5

United States 2. 5,752,289 20.2

Russia 3. 1,564,669 5.5

India 4. 1,510,351 5.3

Japan 5. 1,293,409 4.6

Canada 8. 544,680 1.9

South Korea 9. 475,247 1.7

Australia 16. 372,013 1.3

Indonesia 19. 333,483 1.2

North Korea 42. 79,111 0.3

Nepal 126. 3,241 0.1

Timor-Leste 189. 176 0.1

than the United States. Researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley now calculate that China' s emissions
have increased 11 percent a year from 2004 to 2010
(Figure 2-13). Information from the Netherlands Envi-
ronmental Assessment Agency Report of 2007 details the
amount of CO 2 emissions from 299 countries and ranks
them in terms of the percentage of their global contribu-
tion. Table 2-1 shows some of the report' s country rank-
ings in terms of carbon emissions in 2006.

a surface thaw of a few feet and thousands of lakes form
(these freeze up again in winter). Permafrost is full of
dead plant and animal material that has been locked in
cold storage for thousands of years. When thawed, this
matter emits methane gas. Because of global warming,
the Arctic region is heating up twice as quickly as the rest
of the globe.
Even a modest thaw of the permafrost that lies be-
neath these ephemeral lakes could trigger a vicious cycle:
warming thaws permafrost, which creates lakes, which
thaw permafrost and free more gas, which intensifies
warming, thereby creating more lakes, and so on. Re-
searchers are considering these processes as the reasons
why atmospheric methane concentrations shot up in
2007 and have stayed high ever since. Other signs indi-
cate that permafrost is melting under the Arctic Ocean
floor, thereby loosening the cap on large pockets of
methane gas stored deeper down.
Atmospheric concentrations are sampled on a daily
basis at dozens of sites worldwide. By plugging these
measurements into global climatic models, scientists
have concluded that methane gas is responsible for one-
third of the current warming trend.

METHANE GAS AND
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
Methane (CH 4 ) is another greenhouse gas that is on the
increase. Methane comes from such things as leaking gas
pipelines, coal mines, and municipal landfills (trash).
Agricultural practices including the use of fertilizers,
wetlands and flooded farmlands, such as rice paddies,
along with the belching of cows and other ruminants
also produce methane gas. Although we hear a lot about
CO 2 , we don't hear much about the impact of methane
gas. Pound for pound, methane in the atmosphere traps
25 times more of the sun' s heat than CO 2 does.
Recent research demonstrates that global warming
is causing melting of ice and permanently frozen
ground in the Arctic. Permanently frozen ground is
called permafrost . Permafrost, which averages 80 feet
(24.4 m) in thickness, covers 8.8 million square miles
(22,792,000 km 2 )of the northern hemisphere. In sum-
mer, when the sun is in the northern hemisphere, there is

PHYSICAL IMPACTS
Analysis of tree rings, soil cores, and historical records in
the northern hemisphere indicate that temperature in-
creases of the twentieth century were the largest of any
century of the past 1,000 years. The 1990s were the