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NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory Set For Launch Tomorrow
bughunter writes "The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is slated for launch tomorrow, February 24, 2009. OCO is the first earth science observatory that will create a detailed map of atmospheric carbon dioxide sources and sinks around the globe. And not a moment too soon. Popular Mechanics has a concise article on the science that this mission will perform, and how it fits in with the existing 'A-train' of polar-orbiting earth observatories. JPL's page goes into more detail. And NASA's OCO Launch Blog will have continuous updates as liftoff approaches and the spacecraft reports in and checks out from 700km up."
Am i the only one to read Orbital Canon in the title ? I freaked out just before realizing... No more C&C for me.
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
I presume by "they", you mean atmospheric scientists? Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
If by "they" you mean career warming deniers, then they will use it as "evidence" when they go on talk shows and sell their newest book to the ignorant on the internet.
If you fall into the latter camp, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Stop and figure out which one is right, just like when the satellite troposphere temperature data disagreed with everything else. But the main point of this mission is to gather new data that can't readily be collected from the ground.
As long as it doesn't collide with another satellite. :)
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
I dunno. What will the climate change critics do when it shows that the theories are spot on?
Not a typewriter
Who will win the battle: the pro-troleum anti-AGW crowd, the creationists who believe that man cannot corrupt the Earth since it was created by a loving God, or the Flat-Earthers who think all satellites are a conspiracy from Big Spheroid?
Whoever wins, we lose.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Very classy there. Oh, sure, go ahead -- lump us in with those two groups of anti-scientific, peer-reviewed-research-denying kooks. But I can assure you, we'll be getting the last laugh when you sail off the edge of the Earth.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
If there is any discrepancy between data sets, those folks are going to use it as proof that Global Warming is a hoax. Like this businessman, well he is in the business of climate, I guess that makes him an "expert" to some people and qualifying him to call Global Warming a hoax.
Its interesting that no matter how much knowledge, data, statistics, etc, are gathered, there will always be those that are never convinced. Be the subject, evolution, global warming, or that the earth is round.
I can find people that will vehemently deny the validity of all three of the above. Sometimes you just want to throw your hands up in the air and quit trying.
My favorite one in the right here and now is "Clean Coal" - Well, if you want to convince us that coal is clean energy, then why don't you build a clean coal plant, and let people come in and measure and analyze your work? If they can demonstrate just one "Clean Coal" plant, then that would be worth more than the tens of millions of dollars put into advertising for clean coal. Sorry, but when this OCO gets running its going to be interesting to see the patterns and observations received on the coal plants spewing CO2, NOx, trace Mercury, Sulfur, and other goodies into the air.
But that doesn't mean it will convince some people...
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
presume by "they", you mean atmospheric scientists? Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Or, they would have just been wrong. Hansen, Gore, etc, wrong. Just like everyone else who gets up on the soap box, makes a statement about the universe, and comes back down smacked down by reality. Wrong.
If you fall into the latter camp, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
Hey, I'm hanging onto my lack of sunspots. 2008 came in cooler, and we'll see how 2009 does.
This is my sig.
Because the models can be made better?? When the models can predict sea level rise to the nearest mm in each region of the globe, the exact quantity of ice during the winter of 2094, or the new ocean currents after a 3 degree rise in average temperature, there will still be improvements that can be made.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Most of the life on earth today is evolved for the current conditions, not the conditions that existed when that carbon as sequestered from the environment. At a minimum going back to those levels of CO2 would be uncomfortable. Studies have shown that when the CO2 level in a room is 1000 ppm then over 20% of people feel discomfort from it. With business as usual we could reach that level around 2100.
I know where it went; it is called the carbon cycle. All that CO2 is either in the oceans, in plants/animals and in the air as CO2. I just saved you $273 million dollars, and I take a 10% cut. Check please.
The point is to know precisely where it's going, to know how much its future capacity to soak carbon will be. For example, here's a known case: the oceans. Since we know that a lot of it is going to the oceans, and how much, we can determine what it's carbon soaking capacity will be in the future as it gets more and more saturated. But, to pick some random possibility... carbonates formed from exposed surface rock. If we don't how much CO2 is going into forming additional carbonates naturally, we have no ability to model how much that ability will fade off in the future.
The current models, which generally assume that unknown carbon sinks will remain equally able to keep sinking an unlimited amount of carbon into the future, are likely very overly optimistic on this front on this front.
We've probably made the world a better place for our friends who breathe the stuff.
Most of the world's oceans (2/3rds of the world's available area for photosynthesis) are not CO2-limited, but nutrient-limited. In particular, iron.
Can someone please answer this: If we are burning fossil fuels; presumably all this carbon we are burning was part of the carbon cycle 100s of millions of years ago.
Not necessarily. Oil, and even natural gas and coal deposits are just a fraction of all entombed carbon. There's also shales and all sorts of carbonate minerals. Carbon levels are constantly in flux. Back during the Cambrian, they hit as high as 7,000 ppm. By the mid-Carboniferous, they were down to around 350 ppm. But that took place over the course of 250 million years, an average change of 1ppm every 40,000 years. Some periods were steeper than others, of course; the mid Devonian dropped a ppm every few thousand years, and there are probably more dramatic spikes that we just don't have the resolution to see (more like what we see in the Holocene record). But nothing in the historical record even approaches a relentless 1 1/2 ppm/year.
It's not *that* the Earth is changing. The Earth always changes. The problem is how fast it's changing. I don't know about yours, but my species certainly can't rapidly evolve over the course of a few dozen generations. And much of our infrastructure is fixed in place, unable to adapt at all; you can't just pack people up from areas that are drying out and move them to new Canadian/Siberian farmland without huge expense and hardship.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Assuming all the free carbon in the cycle now was available then; wouldn't the amount of CO2 in the air 100's of millions of years ago been far greater than it is today?
An answer to that question can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth's_atmosphere
Changes in carbon dioxide during the Phanerozoic (the last 542 million years). The recent period is located on the left-hand side of the plot, and it appears that much of the last 550 million years has experienced carbon dioxide concentrations significantly higher than the present day.
We are adding it back quickly; but bringing it to levels where it previously has been. An we went through ice ages AND heat spells then. Are we really changing anything?
I am going to paraphrase your question:
It gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter. But then it gets warm again. So does anything really change?
A huge plume of CO2 located off the eastern coast of Florida.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Particularly apt name.
It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.
Oh really?
In the 'global warming' scenario, short wavelength radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere and warms the earth. The warmed earth then re-radiates long-wavelength infra-red radiation back into space, or at least tries to but is allegedly stopped by carbon dioxide. So...what's wrong with this? CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation in only a narrow wavelength band and it will not absorb any infra-red radiation with a wavelength outside of its absorption band. There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band. (A much bigger absorber of infra-red radiation in the atmosphere is...water vapor...but that's another movie.)
Sorry, but you should really start reading peer-reviewed research and stop listening to viscounts. First off, for something to be a greenhouse gas, it *needs* to be selective on what it blocks. An optimal greenhouse gas is *transparent* to light in the visible and near-IR spectrum, and *opaque* to far-IR. You need to let the sun's energy in (mostly visible and near-IR) while making it harder for what the Earth radiates (mostly far-IR) out. A gas that blocks everything evenly is not a greenhouse gas.
Secondly, your argument is akin to saying that if a reflective blanket keeps 95% of your heat in, putting another reflective blanket around you won't help much. Earth is not a simple physics problem with a surface, a single one-pass medium, and an energy input. Light is constantly absorbed and re-radiated all throughout the atmosphere. The upper layers are colder than the upper layers. The higher the absorption of far-IR, the slower energy can transfer from the lower layers to the upper layers; the lower the absorption of near-IR and visible, the faster energy can transfer from the upper layers to the surface (or even straight to the surface). In short, until a 10-meter or so column of atmosphere can absorb 95%, increasing CO2 levels is a *major* impactor on surface temperature.
Lastly, water vapor is 100% feedback, not forcing. Water vapor has a tiny residency in the atmosphere (days), while CO2 has a long residency (hundreds of years). Any disequilibrium in water vapor is rapidly remedied. Now, on *geological time scales*, CO2 is feedback, mostly to Milankovitch cycles. But that's on the scale of tens of thousands of years.
The effect of increasing CO2 concentration is therefore only to cause absorption to occur at a slightly lower altitude in the atmosphere and after carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation, it quickly collides with nearby, and far more abundant, oxygen and nitrogen molecules, transferring heat to them. These then re-radiate heat out into space.
Wow, was the person you read that from a comedian or just an idiot? CO2 is perfectly capable of radiating IR. *All* objects in the universe are. It doesn't matter whether it's CO2, O2, N2, or what. There are different spectral lines (rather than a perfect blackbody), but it's not a practical distinction. The energy can be radiated in any direction -- up or down. It's almost invariably reabsorbed unless it's in the outermost fringes of the atmosphere. As mentioned before, the more transparent the atmosphere is to "incoming" radiation types, the faster solar energy can migrate to the surface. The less transparent it is to "outgoing" types, the slower far-IR energy can migrate away from the surface. I can make you a drawing or a rudimentary python script to illustrate this concept if you're still having trouble with it.
So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Presumably, they'd follow the scientific method and adjust their theories to fit the new data.
Just like Mann et al did when it turned out some of their tree ring proxies were problematic, and it only took them a decade to replace them with better ones, which produced a conclusion that was similar to but far less sound-bite-worthy than the original.
This is the way science actually works: people generally defend their favoured belief kicking and screaming until they are absolutely forced to give it up. To suggest that people who find the popular press reports of impending doom from anthropogenic global warming less than compelling are in any way anti-scientific is a nice ad hominem that doesn't really belong in a scientific debate.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about climate science: our inability to figure out what is happening to 30% of the CO2 we're polluting the atmosphere with is one of them, and this satellite will hopefully help figure that out.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Meanwhile, you can browse interactive maps of US antropogenic fossil fuel CO2 emissions based on the data produced by Project Vulcan at Purdue. Google Earth browser plugin is needed, or you can load all data in a KML file in Google Earth directly. There is also a flythrough video explaining the different data views. Full disclosure - I'm the programmer who created the maps. Yes, the page is slow to load, but once a layer is accessed, it'll stay cached.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/main/index.html
Ohwell...?