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NASA's Greenhouse Gas Observatory Captures 'First Light'
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that NASA's second attempt to launch a satellite to map carbon dioxide levels across the globe succeeded, and its instruments are operating properly. From the article: NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying Earth's atmospheric climate changing carbon dioxide levels and its carbon cycle has reached its final observing orbit and taken its first science measurements as the leader of the world's first constellation of Earth science satellites known as the International 'A-Train. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) is a research satellite tasked with collecting the first global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) — the leading human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The 'first light' measurements were conducted on Aug. 6 as the observatory flew over central Papua New Guinea and confirmed the health of the science instrument.
I don't think it's climatologists who are the ones dismissing results they don't want. Actually, everyone would love to see that carbon dioxide emissions cause very little warming, but that's just not what the bulk of the data shows.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
First light is significantly more than bootup. After launch, typically at least a few days to weeks are spent doing initial power-on and checkout of various subsystems before collecting science or mission data. The initial health checks (monitoring component temperatures, voltages, currents, communications, powering on subsystems in order, etc) are much more analogous to booting up.
Once initial checks are complete, then the instrument is commanded to collect real data. That is first light. For any satellite like this which is years in the making, first light is most definitely a "cool" milestone.
Source: I work on (unrelated to this) remote sensing satellite systems and have supported at least 8 launches / early orbit testing phases over the years.
You seem to be assuming it's linear and immediate, as opposed to being a complex system with built in lag and other factors -- which would boil down to "if I release X amount of CO2, tomorrow the temperature will go up by Y".
It doesn't work that way, and is much more complex.
Much like if you turn up your thermostat, your house isn't instantly warmer, because, thermodynamics.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most of the heat is going into the oceans and causing the sea level to rise due to thermal expansion. Much of the rest of the heat is continuing to melt the ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
actual warming has kind of flatlined,
I keep hearing this, but I really don't see it.
It's like the repeated statement that "there has been no warming [since the record-setting global average in 1998]". Nobody ever claimed that global temperature would rise monotonically year-on-year; fortunately, we are allowed to look at the trend line across years and draw the quite obvious conclusion that yes, temperatures have been rising in the last two decades as well.
(You'd think the 1998 argument would lose steam after the 2005 and 2010 global temperature anomalies actually surpassed the 1998 record, but I guess it was never an argument made in good faith.)
This is exactly what I referred to above. When "skeptics" can't argue the issue, they dismiss the evidence they don't want by labeling it "propaganda". You can also take a look at my signature.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Cite your facts and your science, because otherwise we conclude you're doing nothing more than making an ad hominem attack on science.
Oh, wait, you don't have any facts, right?
Sorry, but if you want to be given any credibility, you need to show some science which refutes it.
Otherwise, it's the same as if I said "Pino Grigio will reject any science which doesn't fit in with his childish worldview, and nothing he says can be taken as more then the rantings of a deluded idiot".
If I had to choose between the integrity of the NASA scientists and the intelligence of your post, I'm going to have to go with NASA on this one.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Repeating a lie does not make it true.
Everything on Skeptical Science is referenced, if you have some complaint tell us what your problem is.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yes, and really, really huge (many orders of magnitude bigger) amounts of profit would be lost by oil companies' shareholders if we decided to believe the absolutely overwhelming evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. Being a global warming scientist is a lot less lucrative than using those same skills to do just about anything else, so it's really hard to believe that job security is the motivational basis for roughly 99% of scientists who study climate change saying that we have a problem. Chances are that they just want to try to prevent their children seeing the last days of civilization and then dying painfully.
The double irony is that a lot of climate change deniers are the same people who stockpile weapons in case of the collapse of civilization. It's almost as if you bloody well want to spend your last days futilely defending the dwindling supplies in your bunker.
If that's your best argument, it sounds like you've come to the debate unarmed. Congress is notoriously hostile to climate science.
Thank you for the intelligent comment. I worked on the original instrument design at Hamilton Sundstrand over 10 years ago, and it was heartbreaking to learn of the original launch failure. A lot of us suspected but had no evidence that the failure was someone's desired outcome... now that OCO-2 is on station and collecting data we finally feel a sense of accomplishment.
And we'll not only learn who's contributing CO2 to the atmosphere, (and when, and where) but also what's consuming it, so we can not only reduce emissions but we can also sequester it better (e.g., by planting forests in the right places).
I guarantee we'll learn something we didn't expect. And scientists, being scientists, will embrace the surprises rather than reject them. This instrument will help us understand the problem better, produce better model forecasts, and plan better solutions.
I can see the fnords!
At that point, does the world finally point to China and say enough is enough, or will the far left still insist on giving them a MASSIVE out?
That 'out' is the best thing that we can do. If you look carefully, China is moving as fast as it can towards fast breeder reactors, hydro, etc. They're cheaper in the long-run than carbon-based energy sources and much better for their air (and ours) but the capital expense is really high. Look, nobody in Beijing is happy about breathing diesel soup for breakfast.
If you want to reduce China's available capital, you're just going to delay their cleaning up their act. Even the IPCC models count on economic development as a major source of reduction. All the "Scare Numbers" that politicians quote are based on IPCC's worst estimates based on a throttling of economic development.
Economies are dynamic, not static (sorry, Mr. Keynes, your fantasy failed). China has learned the foibles of central-planning - we should not do worse than they did.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The launch of the spacecraft is effectively the start of 'Phase E' (operations) for the instruments ... but there's a lot of things that still have to happen:
They refer to this whole period as "commissioning". They're not always run in order (eg, for the missions to the outer planets, which might take *years* to get to, they try to check on the health of the instruments before they get to the planet). For some instruments, it might take years to validate the data.
There's also typically a press conference with the "first release" of the data, after the first calibration is done, but that's more to do with scientists on the ground than the spacecraft itself.
disclaimer : I work for a NASA center, but I don't deal with spacecraft directly; I just manage the data after it's downlinked & processed.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
He said "scientist who study climate change". You can't find even 5% of that group that says there is no problem
In 1896 Svante Arrhenius said "if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression." Expressed as a formula (and working with Slashdot's font limitations) that is:
(delta)Temperature=(alpha)Ln(C/C(subzero))
Where (alpha) is a constant between 5 and 7 and C is the concentration of CO2 and C(subzero) is the original concentration. That relation still holds and can be verified in the laboratory. In the atmosphere there are complications from interactions with other factors which is what models help us explore but the basic relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature still exists.
You can throw all of the incentives you want at scientists but in the end they still have to reflect the objective reality they are studying. In the end the value of what they produce will be judged against that and only that.
Your cited article was from 2008. It would be interesting to see how the results reported by that poll have changed in the ensuing 6 years. The poll was conducted among geologists and meteorologists, most of whom were not directly studying climate so it doesn't really negate my point. And finally 41 percent plus 44 percent means that 85 percent of them thought there will be problems from global warming. I don't know about you but for me in most cases if 85% of scientists agree to some extent about something I'm going to listen.
I didn't say the oceans aren't absorbing heat, they are. But they are also absorbing CO2. Here's some good introductory material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel