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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.
"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 about treaties and how much a nation emits in total. When doing bottom up, a lot of the data for individual sources comes from the gov. It is worthless when nations lie about their primary sources. Recently, China has admitted that they burned 17% more coal over the last 30+ years. This is because oco-2 caught them. Now, gosat2, along with oco-3 will further increase monitoring only at higher resolution. This will likely result in China, along with the rest of BRIC, having their values go up. We need empirical data and not guesswork based on lies.
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/...