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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."
Is the moon the closest to earth you can get before your science is distorted by politics?
IOU one (1) signature
of the moon....
If you cannot measure success, how do you know it works?
I'm not sure if this is the cheapest way to get the best measurements, but if we're going to invest seriously on technology to control global warming, having objective measurements to track the results is vital.
Otherwise, knee-jerk reactions, politics and PR will control which green-technologies become mainstream, if any.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
We've had this baby ready to launch for years, but for some mysterious reason NASA is having trouble doing anything with climate research. All they need to do is strap it on a DELTA IV rocket.
I'm in favor of lunar development, but this seems kind of pointless. Wouldn't it make more sense to put the insturments in a polar orbit so they'd be closer and get more accurate readings? Heck, even a geosynch orbit is vastly closer than on the moon.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
"We could, like sped the money on CO2 reductions or developing green technology."
Do your part to reduce CO2 by turning off your computer.
Like any other good remote automated weather station (think AWOS), there should be a phone number to dial into, so that pilots could check the local weather, as well as a VHF station for in-flight use. I can imagine the data now:
000:00:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:01:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:02:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:03:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet
000:04:00:00 Winds: Calm, Altimeter: 00.00, Humidity: 0, Visibility: > 20 miles, Celling: > two five thousand feet, caution extreme radiation warning
Stop trolling, troll. You know, people had setellites in space using misterious things called "SOLAR PANEL"s for their power production for a few decades now. And guess what? The EM flux from the sun didn't change, yet, global warming!
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e _Earth's_atmosphere, ALL volcanoes release about,
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
Earth's atmosphere contains about 3 trillion tons of CO2.
Now, let's get some real data about emission,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm
In 2003, 7.303 billion tons of additional CO2 emitted from fossil fuels
See the nice graph they have,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/cumula
Now if they just add India and China accelerating consumption, we would see a huge spike at the end.
So, we are have an ADDITIONAL 7.3/3000 => 0.24% of CO2 by weight per year to the ecosystem.
Now, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_th
130-230 MILLION tons of CO2.
So humanity is releasing, oh, 30-50 TIMES the amount of CO2 by volcanoes during the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME., well, back in 2003.
This also means that current natural system is balanced at volcanic emissions of CO2, not 50 times that, hence CO2 is rising and not being tanked.
Also, if 3000 billion tons of CO2 is 380ppm, then 7.3 (from fossil fuels in 2003) is only 1ppm.. So, that doesn't even account for the total increase of CO2 now hence the number is too low (additional release of CO2 from burning forests probably accounts for the rest, but who weights forests??). CO2 is going up at a current rate of 2 ppm per year and accelerating.
Anyway, what you say is bullshit as seen above. Volcanoes do not account for even a fraction of what is happening in CO2.
Just wait a little bit and "mother nature" will help us increase the CO2 rate much, much faster than even currently. When the Siberian and Canadian bogs defrost and warm up, the Atlantic (aka. Bermuda Triangle) and Black Sea releases their methane (it just needs to warm a little bit more), well, then we'll see global warming. CO2 will be over 1000ppm by end of the century and then, well, you or your kids may just see what happens then.
For example, atoms are the fundamental building blocks of matter; it is extraordinarily arrogant of humanity to think that we can split them. Simple logical thus shows that atom bombs are obviously myths, and it clearly follows that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not destroyed by them. As a "nuclear bomb sceptic", I have previously been assaulted by someone who claimed to be a family member of someone who was killed by a nuclear bomb! I was merely attempting to calmly and patiently explain how bombs were a liberal consipiracy propogated by the all-controlling American liberal media, but alas -- they did not want to listen to the Truth.
They even offered to take me over to Japan to show me the 'destruction' -- when I refused on the grounds that the voyage would take several months by steamship, they preposterously claimed that mankind could fly through the air? How arrogant is that, to think that mankind should have the ability to conquer the sky, which clearly belongs to God; and if He had meant us to fly, He would have given us wings!
Ah, the arrogance of Humanity to believe such things.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.