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NASA Launching Satellite To Track Carbon
An anonymous reader writes A NASA satellite being prepared for launch early on Tuesday is expected to reveal details about where carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas tied to climate change, is being released into Earth's atmosphere on a global scale. From the article: "The $468 million mission is designed to study the main driver of climate change emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes. Some of the carbon dioxide is sucked up by trees and oceans, and the rest is lofted into the atmosphere, trapping the sun's heat and warming the planet. But atmospheric CO2 levels fluctuate with the seasons and in different regions of the Earth. The natural and human activities that cause the changes are complicated. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, or OCO-2 for short, will be able to take an ultra-detailed look at most of the Earth's surface to identify places responsible for producing or absorbing the greenhouse gas."
To science denialists above, I hope you apply equal skepticism to medicine and health and food safety aspects of scientific knowledge. This way your views will have self-correcting, instead of humanity-correcting impact.
Less than half what humans create in hydrocarbon buring and cement making stays in the atmosphere. The ocean is suspected as the major sink, as it turns into something like soda. A more active plant biopshere could be another sink.
Furthermore we dont know all the non-human sources. Is there a significant amount being released from melting permafrost marshes? Some onsite studies suggest the possibility. Volcanoes, melting sedimate methane hydrates too. This satellite could help constrain unkown sources and sinks.
The resuting data is likely to fuel both pro and anti AGW factions. A significant group prefers not to know whatis happening at all and blocked these kind of satellites in the 1990s and 2000s. I wish to know what is happening.
All the more reason to plant and keep more trees, especially oaks and similar trees that will continue to grow for one to several hundred years. The more carbon they store long-term in the wood, the more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, as long as we continue to grow more wood than we burn or allow to decompose. Decomposing wood should be buried a few feet beneath the soil to trap most of the CO2. The slower release of carbon into the soil also makes the soil richer for living plants (see also biochar).
Regardless of whether or not CO2 is really a problem, there are known hazards with extracting fossil fuels, such as the risk for oil spills, natural gas fires and explosions, cancer and poisoning from contact with petroleum, lung disease from inhaling coal dust, and questionable practices such as fracking that may pose risks of earthquakes, sinkholes, and contaminated ground water.
The "experts" assure us that these practices are safe and reliable. But we also had "experts" telling us that smoking was healthy for our lungs, x-rays were safe for checking the fit of our feet in our shoes, asbestos was a safe fire suppressant, sun bathing was healthy for our skin, etc.
Wait, doesn't your rebuttal show that the earth's temperature will not spiral out of control leading to the death and destruction predicted? :P
To be honest you make great points for the view that we are really in a geologic cold period and global warming is just returning us to average temperatures for geologic time frames.