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Cisco, NASA Plan 'Planetary Skin' For Monitoring Earth Climate
Slatterz writes "Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed 'Planetary Skin,' the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called 'Rainforest Skin' which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail."
These sensors use trace amounts of rare metals which may be harmful to the environment in which they are used. Sensors, in the volumes given in the article, will bring large amounts of these metals with them when considered in aggregate.
Relax, there is nothing more safe and secure in the middle of a police free rain forest where illegal logging occurs than expensive and unattended solar panels. Who'd take such a useless and expensive device to sell or use for electricity? Certainly not the loggers or itinerant farmers...
Just throw up some more satellites already. Take a thermo-graphic picture, let the earth spin for 12 hours, and repeat. There you go, a global temperature sample. Repeat for a year, there's your global annual average temperature sample. Compare them for ten years and you have an unambiguous trend.