New research from NAU found that a global database produced by the Climate TRACE consortium, co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, is underestimating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants by an average of 50%.

Professor Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University's School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems analyzed the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the recently released Climate TRACE database. He said these findings raise concerns because accurate and reliable information on greenhouse gas emissions is a critical ingredient for society's response to climate change.

The research is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

"I was interested in how accurately Climate TRACE could estimate power plant CO₂ emissions when using exciting new techniques based on artificial intelligence," Gurney said. "However, only about 4% of the U.S. facilities we analyzed use an AI-based approach. The remainder, 96%, use a very approximate method. This is where the large differences were found."

Gurney and his team matched the Climate TRACE power plants in the United States to a database produced by Gurney's laboratory, "Vulcan-power," which is cross-calibrated with multiple U.S. datasets including those from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.

"While the Vulcan-power data exhibits uncertainty of about 15%, this is far lower than the differences found when we compared these facilities to the Climate TRACE database," said Pawlok Dass, a co-investigator on the study. "The CO₂ emissions were, on average, 50% lower than those same emissions in the Vulcan-power database."

Gurney and colleagues believe that better standardization and scientific rigor will help in establishing good practices for greenhouse gas emissions estimation, helping to ensure that leaders have the most accurate information possible as they craft climate policies and allocate public dollars that will reduce emissions and curb climate change.

"This will make policy choices and money spent to reduce emissions most effective and correctly targeted," said Bilal Aslam, a Ph.D. student working on the emissions study.

"We will never estimate emissions with perfect accuracy, but we must ensure that the data shared with policymakers and the public meet the most rigorous scientific standards available," Gurney said.

Gurney, who specializes in atmospheric science, ecology and public policy, has spent the past two decades developing a standardized system quantifying greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. His Vulcan and Hestia projects, funded by multiple federal agencies, quantifies and visualizes greenhouse gases emitted across the entire country down to individual power plants, neighborhoods and roadways, identifying problem areas and enabling better decisions about where to cut emissions most effectively.

His estimates have shown excellent performance when compared to direct atmospheric monitoring. Gurney has authored more than 160 scientific publications, including a recent U.S. National Academy Report, "Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Decisionmaking." He has been involved with the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol for more than 25 years and is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).