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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.
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.
Auto shops also have an incentive to pass the car, or at least almost pass the car and then do some work on it.
Here in California, the shop that does the testing is forbidden to do any needed repairs for exactly that reason. And, if you do need repairs, the shop that did the original test can't charge for the retesting.
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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.
Here in Denver, CO, we monitor from highway on-ramps to determine which cars are in need of repairs.
What about cars that never go near an on-ramp?
Still, I've read enough to have read that, for quite some time, a new car is generally so clean that the emissions from the tailpipe are lower than what it's sucking in, as long as you're not counting CO2 as pollution.
Meanwhile, running a lawn mower for half an hour can spew out more pollutants than said car will all month. A car in poor operating conditions can outweigh literally hundreds of it's peers that are in good operating condition.
So what do you do? Spend thousands to clean up new cars even more, thousands to clean up malfunctioning automobiles, or hundreds cleaning up the lawn mowers? Some mix of the three?
I don't read AC A human right
Too bad we can't survive in an atmosphere of 35% oxygen and 6 to 10 times more CO2. So the distant past is irrelevant - we live in a different environment. Change it too much, we will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
ASHRAE and OSHA standards: 1000 ppm
general drowsiness: 1000 - 2500 ppm
adverse health effects expected: 2500 - 5000 ppm
2500 ppm is less than 10x today's CO2 content.
sea-level air has a partial pressure of oxygen of 0.21 bar (21 kPa) and the lower limit for toxicity is more than 0.3 bar (30 kPa)
With a 35% O2 concentration, that's 35 kpa, which is above the lower limit of toxicity.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This raises the question of climate change. It should be conveyed and understood that we are in a phase of “icehouse earth” that is abnormally cool for the planet. While this phase has lasted the entirety of human civilization and would have drastic consequences for many species should it end, it must be understood that temperatures and CO2 levels have normally been far higher, and the industrial contribution is relatively tiny.
No it doesn't raise a question about climate change. Why do you think humans exist independent of the climate system? The climate switching to the "hothouse" Earth would summarily cause an extinction event with an extremely high likelihood of taking us with it. That's the whole point.
Your argument of "in the past" is completely irrelevant to present day. The current biodiversity (which has been precipitously plummeting as of late) is based on the current climate. Our species depends on the current climate. Our arable regions and crops depend on the current climate. Our coastal regions depend on the current climate. If you want to do a historical comparison, look at what happen whenever there is a significant global climate divergence.
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...
Those "super-plumes" were part of a massive extinction event that continued for millions of years. Then it took millions of years for bio-diversity to recovery.Then it millions more for us to climb down out of the trees. During all that time there were occasional extinction events. Finally, 50,000 years ago or so modern humans showed up and were doing doing relatively well until about 10,000-20,000 years ago when (again) another major climate shift occurred and almost wiped us of the face of the Earth.
The relevant point here is that when climate shifts happen, regardless of cause, it is detrimental to the current life on the planet. It is extremely naive to think that our technology has advanced to the point where such climate shifts wouldn't severely impact our species.
“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.
And that took MILLIONS.OF.YEARS. In the meantime, 75% of the species that existed at the time were wiped out. Not to mention the fact that large swaths of the Earth would become inhospitable to human life if temperatures were 6C-8C warmer or the other negative impacts that go along with higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
The rest of your ludicrous arguments all fail for the exact same reason. You seem to think a warmer planet/higher CO2 level is a good thing while completely ignoring the global devastation it took to get to those conditions. That seems to the thing you just don't get. We have not lived in hot house conditions. Our crops have not lived in hot house conditions. The current life on this planet has not lived in hot house conditions.
Even in our own short history, even regional climate disruptions were enough to destroy civilizations. If you think a major climate shift of any kind will simply be just all unicorns and rainbows for the human raise you're either incredibly stupid or incredibly naive.
~X~