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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."
You obliviously know nothing about science. Until we eliminate all carbon dioxide from the earth's atmosphere, humanity will be in danger.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
We must go even further than that. We must entirely eliminate all carbon and carbon-containing compounds from the earth's biosphere. Otherwise, oxidation of organic compounds will once again result in the release of CO2.
As a side effect, doing so will eliminate all danger of young children dying due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Think of the children!
We need a satellite to get (almost) real time insight in CO2 sources and sinks and the atmospheric mixing.
From the article, it seems like there's a couple of reasons:
- Identify areas that are actively absorbing CO2 emissions. This is important because we can use it to figure out what the best way to naturally absorb CO2 is for use in things like city planning. For instance, we know that forests and the ocean absorb CO2, but we probably don't know which plants are the most efficient at doing so. If we find out which are the most efficient, they could probably be used in "green roof" projects in cities and in urban planning to alleviate CO2 output from cars.
- Study the difference in natural CO2 emissions (ie; not from burning fossil fuels) through the seasons, presumably to better identify man-made CO2 emissions.
- Find out what happens to the CO2 we emit once it reaches the atmosphere. Obviously, there Is always going to be CO2 in the atmosphere, but where it is and how it moves is a different story.
This was the coldest winter this country has ever seen. Fact.
Not a fact.
The winter of 2013 - 2014 was one of the ten coldest winters in history in the Midwest U.S.
It was the warmest winter on record in California, and set records for high temperatures in Alaska.
Overall, it was the 34th coolest winter in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895. The contiguous United States comprises 1.5% of the surface area of the Earth. One season, in 1.5% of the Earth's surface: this is weather, not climate
http://www.wunderground.com/bl...
http://www.weather.com/news/wi...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The contempt for curiosity held by one side of this conversation is alarming. You start by noting how numerous and complex the sources of carbon dioxide are but conclude that gathering data on this is pointless.