Because the linked article might be difficult for some people to parse through, I’ll offer a brief explanation of what you are looking at:
Basically every year, a certain amount of carbon emissions get released into the atmosphere in excess of what should naturally be up there. Every country on Earth is responsible for releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. However, it is not fair to assign blame/responsibility for climate change purely based on who is releasing the most CO2, because bigger countries will naturally release more.
Instead, they calculated a budget of how much CO2 each country should reasonably be allowed to release into the atmosphere based upon their population size. From there they they looked at which countries overshot their budget and by how much.
What’s special here is that they didn’t base their calculations purely off of CURRENT emissions. Climate change happens over time. Countries that have recently increased their emissions should not be held as responsible as those who have had high rates of emissions for decades. Instead, they based their calculations on the amount of emissions each country produced/ should have reasonably be allowed to produce over several decades (which is why India and China, despite CURRENTLY producing a lot of CO2 are not up on that graphic. They had not exceeded their budget as of 2015, which is the end of the time span the researchers looked at).
They then divided countries between “overshooters” and “undershooters”. They added up each overshooting country’s excess carbon emissions and from there determined what percentage of those excess carbon emissions each overshooting country was responsible for and that’s where they got the numbers you see up there.
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