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.

Comments

Launching shortly:

[ctrl-alt-delete]

http://www.ghgsat.com/

"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.

Re: tops down, bottoms up!

[WindBourne]

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.