NASA Launches Satellite To Monitor Oceans

On Friday, NASA launched the Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason 2 satellite into orbit to begin a detailed study of ocean currents, sea-surface height, and surface topology. Scientists hope to use the data gathered by Jason 2 in order to better understand weather patterns and global warming. Further details about the mission objectives (PDF) are also available. Quoting NASA's press release: "Combining ocean current and heat storage data is key to understanding global climate variations. OSTM/Jason 2's expected lifetime of at least three years will extend into the next decade the continuous record of these data started in 1992 by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, or CNES, with the TOPEX/Poseidon mission. The data collection was continued by the two agencies on Jason 1 in 2001. Compared with Jason 1 measurements, OSTM/Jason 2 will have substantially increased accuracy and provide data to within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of coastlines, nearly 50 percent closer to shore than in the past."

Comments

Re:Of course it has.

[KasperMeerts]

Not really. I don't know about pre-Christ temperatures, but the last 2 millenia, Earth has been cooling down.
I live in Belgium and there used to be a vineyard close to where I live in the Middle-Ages. Nowadays that completely impossible. Man is trying to reverse that trend.

Also, every climate change that happened the last 10,000 years has been very, very slow and minuscule in comparison to the 0.7 degrees we did in only one century.
But the question is not who is right, the question is: what are we going to do about it. Regardless if it's our fault or just natural, our society can't take any climate changes. We need to reverse any changes happening until we are able to cope them.
And everything is making clear that greenhouse gases heat up our planet waaaay faster than it should.

Re:There is warming, and there is "warming".

[drinkypoo]

But when most people say "global warming", what they really mean is MAN-CAUSED global warming. Even more specifically, it usually means that they have bought into the whole CO2-based warming model.

Dude, even the Bush white house now admits that human activities specifically including CO2 emissions are a factor in global warming; the "debate" is now over the extent to which human involvement has changed the climate, and what to do about it if anything.

The problem here being that if the man-caused global warming theories were to be believed, we would NOT have had a record cold northern hemisphere this year. Even with all the other complications, it would have continued to get warmer on that scale.

And you base this belief on what, exactly? The whole reason the question of the extent of mankind's involvement in global weather patterns (let's face it, deforestation is very much an activity of man, and forests are a major figure in global weather theater) has not been answered is that weather is complex, even chaotic. There can be warm years in the middle of runs of colder years, why not a colder year in the middle of a series of warmer ones?

Further, the CO2-based warming theory REQUIRES the upper atmosphere to be warming at a rate proportional to the low-altitude temperature... and it simply has not been. Actual satellite and weather balloon temperature data do not support the CO2 warming theory at all.

The theory has never been that CO2 is the sole factor. But, you know, don't let facts get in the way of satisfying rhetoric.

Finally, just because I love to keep going, even if CO2 weren't a contributor to global warming, there are still many reasons why releasing a lot of it is a bad idea, especially while we are deforesting and killing off algae needed to process that CO2.