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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.
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.
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.