Who caused climate change?
The atmosphere adds emissions up. What warms the planet is not what a country emits this year but everything it has ever emitted — so the ranking of responsibility looks nothing like the ranking of today's emitters.
Cumulative means the running total of everything emitted so far, not this year's flow. These are territorial emissions: they count what is emitted inside a country's borders, so the CO₂ of an imported steel beam belongs to whoever smelted it. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are in the world total only, which is why the countries here sum to about 84% of it rather than to all of it.
EU-27 and World are aggregates, drawn as reference lines and labelled as such. Every EU member listed separately is also inside the EU-27 figure, so the shares on this page deliberately do not sum to 100%.
Per person divides the running total by the population of the year being shown. At the latest year that is cumulative emissions per person alive today — the usual framing in equity arguments, and the reason the United States sits above 1,200 tonnes per person while India is under 50. It is not a year-by-year per-capita average, and it is not a claim about what anyone alive has personally emitted. The per-person view stops a year earlier than the others, because the population series does.
Land use can lower a total. The toggle adds CO₂ from deforestation and other land-use change. For Brazil and Indonesia that is most of their contribution; for Germany, the UK, France and Czechia the figure goes slightly down, because those countries have regrown more forest than they have cleared since 1850. The land-use series only starts accumulating in 1850, where the fossil one starts in 1750, so with the toggle on the chart begins in 1900 — before that the two are not comparable.
"Where consumed" is trade-adjusted. It moves the CO₂ of a traded good from the country that made it to the country that bought it, using the Global Carbon Budget's multi-region input-output model. It changes the picture most for countries that import what they use: Switzerland's figure roughly triples, and the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany all rise, while China, Russia and India fall. Two limits are unavoidable. It only exists from 1990, because no input-output model reaches further back — though 58% of all CO₂ ever emitted was emitted after 1990. And it excludes land-use change, so the deforestation toggle does not apply to it.
Warming caused is Jones et al.'s attribution of the observed rise in global mean surface temperature to each country's cumulative CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide, combined using GWP*. It is a single series with the gases already combined, so the land-use toggle does not apply to it.