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Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon
CryogenicKeen writes with the news that a University of Michigan study indicates the perfect place to monitor Earth's climate system would be the surface of the moon. The side facing us is a perfect location to monitor temperatures and weather patterns here on our planet, and a UM paper proposes an international effort to deploy monitoring stations on Earth's natural satellite. "On the near side of the airless moon, where Apollo 15 landed, surface temperature is controlled by solar radiation during daytime and energy radiated from Earth at night. Huang showed that due to an amplifying effect, even weak radiation from Earth produces measurable temperature changes in the regolith. Further, his revisit of the data revealed distinctly different characteristics in daytime and nighttime lunar surface temperature variations. This allowed him to uncover a lunar night-time warming trend from mid-1972 to late 1975, which was consistent with a global dimming of Earth that occurred over the same period and was due to a general decrease of sunlight over land surfaces."
Err, yuo know what /. is?
The answer would be something like, Do your part to reduce CO2 by building a more energy efficient computer!
Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
No, it wouldn't make more sense, since he proposes measuring the temperature variation in the lunar surface dust (regolith). What he measures with this is a global average Earth temperature, avoiding problems such as having weather stations in city heat islands. Additionally, the method also measures heating changes due to variations in solar input. Both of these criticisms have arisen among the anti-global warming crowd, so the addition of this methodology is useful. Plus, it's not like it replaces the use of orbiting satellites, getting the required additional funding from Big Oil-controlled politicians notwithstanding. *cough cough*
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
from which to measure and study so called global warming. Or more accurately, solar radiation fluctuations and its effects on its satellites (the moon and earth).
The overwhelming arrogance of some people to believe that mere humans and our assorted activities have a major impact on the (average) mass of the atmosphere of about 5,000 trillion metric tons, is astounding in the extreme. A single volcanic eruption spews more "greenhouse gases" and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activity for a decade. And yet the worst that happens (globally)are beautiful sunsets for a couple of years then its gone.
The most logical and common sense reason for climate temperature variations is that great, bright, flaming ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky. Which, by the way, is known to be variable in its output. So putting a sensor array on the moon, away from the influence of human activities , will finally settle this matter once and for all, so we can get on with more important matters. Like fair taxes http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer, or ending genocide http://www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=yes, or who will be the next "American Idol". Oh, and if you really want to reduce CO2 emissions, plant a few trees or flowers, they love the stuff.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
No, you can't, because walking down the street where the car is tells you nothing about the pollution being created by the power plant that makes the electricity, nor does it tell you anything about the possibly highly toxic metals and/or chemicals used in the battery which will pollute where and when the car is disposed of.
The electric car may be a step towards less pollution. It may not be. To be honest, I suspect it will be. But you're not going to be able to tell just by watching the car. You're going to need to be a little more systematic than that.
Chris Mattern
Nah, I think the problem is the frick'in 2 year design lifespan. Why should we spend all that money to get it up there if it's only going to last 2 years? Climate changes are long term. What the hell?
Granted it will probably last longer than that but maybe not.
The moon used to rotate, during that time, the side we see got cratered up pretty bad. Now that it doesn't rotate anymore the Earth facing side doesn't see a lot of impacts.
We've already sent the Mars probes and the Mars Climate Orbiter. If we're lucky, we'll send a Mars Climate Orbiter that actually stays in the correct orbit soon. So, we're covering that end.
I believe someone also just sent a probe into Jupiter. It took a while to get there, but we should have climate data on Jupiter and some of its moons by now.
I think we've even tried a solar orbiter.
So, we're already doing other planets. (Climate on Venus: hot enough to melt probes--but then, Venus has a huge problem with greenhouse gasses.) We just need to play with our own some more.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney