Climate Feedback

If there was an eye in the sky keeping watch on our greenhouse gas emissions, what carbon crimes would it reveal?

The ability to measure greenhouse gases from space, soon to become a reality, could answer this question.

Currently, it’s virtually impossible to identify the exact source – and destination - of greenhouse gases, a prominent theme at this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna.

But, according to scientists speaking today at the conference, this is all set to change within the coming year when two major satellites designed to monitor greenhouse gases will be launched into space.

Due to leave Earth on December 15, the first of these is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a US$300 million-or-so innovation of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The Japanese version, known as the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, or GOSAT, has an anticipated launch date in January or February 2009.

For a detailed low-down on the satellites and how they will work, see Amanda Haag’s news feature in Nature (subscription) last December. Since then, the scientists have mostly been testing and calibrating the instruments to make sure they work once they’re orbiting the Earth.

Within a year or two, if not sooner, they will enable scientists to identify major sources and sinks or carbon, says Charles Miller, one of the Principal Co-ordinators of the OCO mission. The greenhouse gas measurements taken by the instrument, which will orbit the planet 14.5 times per day, will be three times more precise than any trace gas measurements ever taken from space.

All-in-all, the missions represent an unprecedented effort to collect global climate data from space. While this is fascinating from a scientific perspective, it should also have some interesting political implications by enabling the easy identification of climate culprits.

“If one were to imagine a way to monitor or verify [emissions], then this would be the way to go”, says Miller. For instance, it should quash (or raise, depending on who you’re talking to) fears that nations claiming credits for avoiding deforestation under the Kyoto Protocol will be able to divert the problem elsewhere.

Miller says they often joke that the instrument could detect the greenhouse gas emissions of serious carbon heaveyweights from space. But while the new satellites won’t realistically help reporting on individual carbon crimes, it could act as a ‘big brother’ to keep countries in line with their Kyoto commitments. Personally, I’m curious to know the OCO’s own carbon footprint!

That’s all from me from this year’s European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna. Over and out….

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 18, 2008
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Conferences and Meetings, EGU 2008, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today Australia sees the opening of the world's largest trial carbon storage plant (Sydney Morning Herald, BBC, Reuters), the construction of which was covered by Hannah Hoag in Nature Reports Climate Change last year. Since then, soaring costs have prompted the US to junk plans for its FutureGen clean coal power plant, and the down-under demo project is the most massive noncommercial carbon burial site to make it off the drawing board (this Nature News feature rounds up the other contenders as of 2006; subscription required).

For background on how natural rock formations are being used to trap carbon dioxide - and why environmentalists have called the plant a waste of time and money - check out Hannah's report.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on April 02, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Mitigation, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The dizzying economic growth in Asia threatens to disappoint expectations that new technologies will provide an easy fix for our climate problem, warn the authors of a commentary article in Nature this week.
Roger Pielke, Tom Wigley and Christopher Green believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Change Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its work, plays “a risky game” when assuming that “spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry out most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions.”

Most of the emissions scenarios that the IPCC considered for its last report include significant ‘built-in’ technological change. In other words, the IPCC assumes that a good deal of climate-friendly innovation will happen spontaneously, in the absence of climate policy measures.

Now, necessity, economic growth and pursuit of profit do generate all kinds of more or less useful new technologies, from atomic bombs to iPods. But assuming that pure market forces will readily come to our aid in matters of climate change might be too optimistic, the commentary authors warn. Worse, they say, the assumption of a lot of spontaneous technological change could be misinterpreted as a license for policymakers not to take aggressive action.

Pielke, Wigley and Green have stirred up a hornets’ nest with their analysis. Some initial reactions to their call to arms are collected in an accompanying news piece. Expert opinions range from “overdue” to “totally misleading”.

So who’s right and who’s wrong, then? Are we dramatically underestimating the challenge of climate change? Or is this just one more twist exercised to unnecessarily dramatize an admittedly serious problem? Or is it all just shadow-boxing in the arcane world of scenario-making?

Economics of climate change are a politicized field. Depending on one’s standpoint (on what market forces can or cannot do, for example), one may find different answers to these questions. Less disputable is the fact that some two billion people in China and India are on the point of adapting to western living standards. Their consumptive power and increasing mobility will add to the global climate and energy problem. Let’s hope that their creativity and engineering skills will also add to its solution.

Quirin Schiermeier

Illustration: B. Mellor

Posted by Anna Barnett on March 31, 2008
Categories: Climate Science, Quirin Schiermeier, Technology | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

In the race to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the Royal Society now plans to back promising new technology with venture capital as well as intellectual clout. The Society announced Thursday it will sink its first-ever investment fund into businesses developing carbon capture and renewable energy, along with water purification and other world-saving innovations (Financial Times).

Continue reading "Royal Society to fund carbon capture and renewables ventures" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 29, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Business, In the News, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

AAAS, Boston -

Whether technology can cure the world’s ills has been a hot topic at this year’s AAAS conference.

I joined Alok Jah and James Randerson as a guest commentator on the Guardian’s weekly science podcast yesterday to discuss, among other highlights from the AAAS meeting, whether we can rely on technology as our sole solution to climate change.

We recorded in Toscanini’s ice-cream café in Cambridge, MA, an institution as famous for its clientele (nobel and ignoble laureates and the Dalai Lama), as much as for it’s delectable ice-cream….the wort variety comes highly recommended!

The impetus for our technology discussion was the release of a report at AAAS by a specialist panel convened to predict the great engineering challenges that humanity will face in the 21st century.

A select group of big names and big thinkers, the blue ribbon panel included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Craig Venter, entrepreneur, geneticist and billionaire, Lord Broers, a former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Ray Kurzweil, futurologist, software engineer and alleged recipient of some 14 honorary doctorates.

Kurzweil sees no end to the possibilities of what technology can achieve this century – from creating artificial intelligence to match the human intellect to reversing the signs of aging. His basis for these assertions is the rate at which technology is advancing – a doubling every two decades. Though this may sound modest, its cumulative effect is worth contemplating – that’s 32 times more technical progress over the next 50 years than there has been in the past half-century!

The views of the panel are positively circumspect in comparison to Kurzweil’s, though are none-the-less fascinating.

Continue reading "Can technology stop the world from warming (and my ice-cream from melting)? " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on February 18, 2008
Categories: AAAS, Conferences and Meetings, Energy, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A novel approach to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere based on the Earth's natural weathering process, which Olive Heffernan reported on in November, is getting more attention.

John Shepherd discusses the technique, developed by graduate student Kurt Zen House and colleagues, in a Journal Club column in Nature today, concluding:

The scheme House et al. outline looks promising if it were operated using a solar or geothermal electricity source near a supply of basic rocks. A mid-ocean volcanic island would be good. And the environmental consequences of the scheme's discharges should be less severe than those of the ocean acidification that humans are already causing.

A simple geoengineering solution to soak up carbon dioxide without catastrophic side effects should raise interest, and it has. But Shepherd says that what geoengineering ideas need now, and haven't got, is seed funding for pilot projects. "None of the research councils has so far felt that it's their patch," says Shepherd, but "DEFRA are beginning to take an interest, and both the Tyndall Centre and the Royal Society are now contemplating meetings or studies on geoengineering, so maybe things will hot up a bit sometime soon."

Anna Barnett

Photo: Getty

Posted by Anna Barnett on February 14, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you resolve to use less energy for your home appliances in 2008? In a study released yesterday, a lab within the the US Department of Energy found that lots of Americans (or at least lots of Pacific Northwesterners) want to do the same - and given more information, tools, and sophisticated market incentives, they'll actually do it. To the tune of 15% less peak power use and 10% lower household electric bills.

Continue reading "Technology lessens Americans' power hunger " »

Posted by Anna Barnett on January 10, 2008
Categories: Anna Barnett, Climate Policy, Energy, Personal action, Technology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)