Which climate gases is it the most important to reduce?

If the Kyoto Protocol had used another method for comparing the various climate gases, Norway might have had to implement more and more expensive measures. The selection of methods may be important for the making of new agreements after Kyoto. Calculations show the importance of the comparison methods for the various climate gases in negotiating new climate agreements. The Kyoto Protocol regulates the total emission of climate gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), laughing gas (N2O) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), and halo fluoro carbons and perfluoro carbon. It is up to each country to choose which of these gases to concentrate on, and a tool is therefore needed to compare the effects of the various gases. In the Kyoto agreement, this is done by means of the global warming potential (GWP) of each gas over a period of 100 years. But different climate gases have different atmospheric residence times and it is not evident how the gases must be compared. Reducing the emission of methane has a strong and short-term effect while reducing the emission of carbon dioxide has a weaker but more lasting effect. Researchers have suggested other ways of comparison than the one used in the Kyoto Protocol. Among other things one may calculate the global warming potential for another time horizon than 100 years. Researchers at Cicero have investigated the consequences of two other ways of weighing climate gases: GWP(20) with time horizon of 20 years gives more weight to short-lived gases like methane, while GWP(500) with a time horizon of 500 years is more favourable to the long-lived gases. To see how much the selection of comparing method means in practice, the consequences for Norway using GWP(20) or GWP(500), have been calculated