Slashdot Mirror
Forget "Bottom-up" Reporting of Emissions; Try an Atmospheric Monitoring System (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: Ray Weiss at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography describes how countries report greenhouse gas emissions -- a 'bottom-up' approach that can result in inventories that differ from those determined by measuring the actual increases of emitted gases in the atmosphere. Weiss proposes a 'top-down" atmospheric monitoring system for greenhouse gases, and goes into the technology that already exists for doing so.
the benefit of reporting bottoms up is you can see a list of your primary sources and work to clean up those sources. if you just get a tops down number, it doesn't provide any indications about how to start cleaning things up.
"GHGSat is building and will launch and operate the world’s first satellite capable of monitoring greenhouse gas (GHG) and air quality gas (AQG) emissions from any industrial site in the world."
It's built and launching shortly.
This is probably also a good idea to make sure the supposed carbon fixation projects actually do so at the rate they're supposed to.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Make checking emissions be part of a random number of police stops.
People game emissions tests; they've been doing it for decades. I knew a guy who had a light switch wired into a component in his engine that he would flip when he took it in for testing. Auto shops also have an incentive to pass the car, or at least almost pass the car and then do some work on it. And then there are the car manufacturers...
I can only assume the author completely missed the Harris booth at the conference.
There, he would have learned about NASA's ASCENDS program, where teams from JPL, Goddard, and Harris have all flown prototypes for space-borne CO2 mapping LIDARs on the DC-8 flying laboratory. He would have learned about NASA's ACT-America science mission that's outfitting a C-130 with a suite of CO2 mapping instruments to investigate Active Carbon Transport over a 3 year mission. He would have learned about GreenLITE, a terrestrial scanning LIDAR providing a REAL TIME MAP of CO2 emissions across a swath of downtown Paris, implemented specifically for the conference.
He would also have learned about GOSAT-2, Japan's second generation CO2 mapping satellite, set to launch in 2017. And maybe that would have sparked his interest in the first generation GOSAT launched in 2009, or the first generation US satellite OCO-2 launched in 2014.
It's like the author is completely unaware of the technology developed specifically to address his concerns.
Ray is correct that the current means does not enable true measuring. It is far too unreliable ESP since gov data is used by nations with a proclivity for 'inaccurate' data. But rather than use aircrafts, we should be using a network of SATs that are equal or better to oco-2. By using a network, we can see exactly what co2 flows in and out of a nation. Oco-2 had provided a number of surprises for the climate scientists that are still being reconciled.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
“We find that CO2 emissions [during the Cretaceous] resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.” http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...
Until the past two centuries, the concentrations of CO2 ... had never exceeded about 280 ppm... Current concentrations of CO2 are about 390 ppm...
http://www.acs.org/content/acs...
“We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... 72 percent of the world's petroleum supply comes from Cretaceous rocks. Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity... [The Cretaceous supported] 8 or 9 tropic levels, which cannot be supported today.” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/.../sloan...
“The earth is currently in an icehouse stage, as ice sheets are present on both poles and glacial periods have occurred at regular intervals over the past million years... Earth is more commonly placed in a greenhouse state throughout the epochs, and the Earth has been in this state for approximately 80% of the past 500 million years... Permanent ice is actually a rare phenomenon in the history of the Earth, occurring only during the 20% of the time that the planet is under an icehouse effect.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The best approach is to simply make any business in an industrial zone which has a smokestack pay for monitoring. Don't specify the means of monitoring, just specify what has to be monitored and how accurately. The free market will provide the hardware. The producers should be responsible for paying for the maintenance. In the bargain, implement a forced 30-day shutdown for any site found to be deliberately tampering with their emissions equipment, and longer forced shutdowns for subsequent offenses... let's say, tripling the duration each time. Three offenses would shut down a plant for a total of over a year, and four would pretty much write it off.
I'm not against atmospheric monitoring, but it's "never" (not any time soon) going to be as good as point-of-production monitoring. Every one of us who has a car made since 1996 is living under a regime like this, and in fact, the system is actually working very well to reduce automotive emissions. The car knows when it is producing excessive emissions and will light the MIL (malfunction indicator light) when it is producing more than 2.5 times the federal test standard. Cars usually produce way under the standard or way over, unless they have just a minor exhaust or intake leak or similar. It's illegal to tamper with the system and regular inspections "ensure" that this is not being done.
Atmospheric monitoring is a good way to check to see if anyone is violating their restrictions, and approximately where they are located, but you're going to have to sample their stacks directly no matter what. Why not have that going on in realtime, everywhere? It's a minor line item for the producers in terms of cost.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is an awesome idea! Now the environmental whackjobs can include NATURAL GHG emissions in their total claims of MANMADE GHG emissions. This is, of course, the point; they want to make the problem look much bigger than it really is, because of course they want more government money.
because monitoring temperature the same way has worked so well for the climate hysterics.
*GASP* Holy crap! How dumb is that? We've been assuming that bottom up measurements are accurate. Let's think about this for a moment. You can't measure every single source nor can you measure any source with 100% accuracy. So what you end up with is a statistical approximation. Let's try an experiment that you can do at home. Go buy 100 resistors all of the same value, say 1k ohms. Hook them all up in series. Measure the resistance. The math would tell you that you should get 100k ohms. Ok, so everybody who knows a bit about electronics knows that resistors have tolerance. These days you can get pretty good ones for pennies. But since you're not measuring every one of them, you can't say for sure that they are within rated tolerance. You're assuming that the manufacturer is reporting the tolerance accurately. Let's also say that you get 100 people all over the globe to do this same test but they have to buy their own parts and you give them a limited budget to do so and whatever they don't spend they get to keep. Can you say that everyone performed the test the same way? And yet governments are creating policies based on an assumption of 100% accurate testing.
I will draw your attention to my opening statement:
I support all reasonable caution for the environment. I also have an interest in climate science, and the causes and conditions of "snowball/icehouse/hothouse" earth. You seem to have less interest in climate metastability as you call it "completely irrelevant" - this is your purview.
...it asserts that the extinctions followed the impact.
There were signs that diesels weren't as clean as they were advertised (and VW was found to be actually cheating) when the actual NOx emissions measured in cities were rising much faster than the models using the manufacturers emission numbers predicted.
Probably a good idea to do both measurements.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
When I make Bottom Emissions I blame the dog. Any Atmospheric Monitoring & Reporting system would show the dog as blameless and put suspicion back on me, so I'm against it!