Is the N₂O number even real?

Nitrous oxide warms the planet roughly 270× as hard as CO₂, and most of it (from wastewater plants and farm soil) is never actually measured. It’s assumed: a single IPCC emission factor, a fixed fraction of nitrogen load, standing in for a number that swings by close to an order of magnitude with season, load, temperature, and rain.

That’s a problem, because you can’t abate or credit what you can’t measure. A flat factor can’t see the episodic spikes that dominate the real total: the hot moments after fertiliser and rain, the process upsets in a treatment plant.

The useful part: high-resolution measurements exist. There’s open, two-minute-interval N₂O data from full-scale wastewater plants, and a growing pile of flux studies from farm soils. Enough to ask the honest question directly.

How far is the assumed number from the measured one, and what does an uncertainty-aware estimate actually look like?

That’s what this teardown works through: reproduce the standard emission-factor estimate, put it next to the measured data, quantify the gap, and show the honest version with its error bars intact.