> Now let us return to why the reported Chinese CO2 emissions growth in the communique is so much lower than our projection in the 2018 Global Carbon Budget. The real reason is not clear, but the problem is an unexplained inconsistency in the coal statistics in the communique. [...] >There is no apparent explanation for these discrepancies. Some people have suggested that China’s statistics bureau is manipulating the data to make coal consumption growth look smoother than it actually is, although there is no direct evidence for this. Whatever the case, the discrepancy over coal means that overall CO2 growth could be as high as around 4% – compared to 2.3% reported in the communique – even before accounting for other sources of uncertainty that we usually include in our analyses. Those factors push the uncertainty range even wider, to -0.4% to +6.7%. ...