Thursday, August 6, 2009

Results of Emissions Poll

My poll on what global greenhouse gas emissions would be in 2050 is over and here are the results:


The final distribution is still somewhat bimodal. The only person who chose "no change" was me. I presume that there will be increased action to address climate change in the next 40 years, but going by the precedent of the Kyoto Treaty it won't be as effective as its proponents hope. Still as most business as usual scenarios (apart from civilizational collapse) would see emissions increasing and maybe doubling the cuts that will be achieved relative to BAU are still very significant. OTOH exactly "no change" has a probability of zero of occurring, but I didn't feel like I had enough information to go for the slight increase or slight decrease categories.

To compute the mean value of the poll, I assigned the following values to the intervals:

100% or more = 125%, 50-100% = 75%, 25-50% = 37.5%, 0-25% = 12.5%, 0-neg25 = -12.5%, neg25-neg50% = -37.5%, neg50-neg100% = -75%

The mean is a 3.2% increase.

So opinion is fairly evenly divided. 13 voted for an increase and 12 for a decrease.

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