Purdue scientists have contributed a new feature to Google Earth: depiction of carbon emissions around the United States.
“This will bring emissions information into everyone’s living room as a recognizable, accessible online experience,” Kevin Gurney, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue, said.
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| Precise, yes; but is it accurate? |
Actually, this will contribute little to the climate change debate except confusion. It will create a false sense of understanding in those who look at data for a given locale and think they can infer the locale’s contribution to global warming.
According to NASA’s David Crisp, who led the project to launch a CO2-measuring satellite called “OCO,” “we don’t understand the processes that are absorbing over 60% of the CO2 that we’re putting out today…. We can’t accurately predict how much CO2 will be in our atmosphere 50 years from now.” OCO failed to launch, but had it succeeded it would only have been able to measure large areas–on the order of the State of Colorado–and could not have accurately isolated even regional sources of of CO2. (Click here to listen to NPR’s coverage.) Google Earth’s city- and county-specific emissions levels seem speculative.
There’s a lot more we don’t know. Despite contrary claims, we don’t know long-past atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The physics of CO2’s role in global temperature is debated (in part because CO2 follows rather than leads temperature), but it is certainly minuscule compared with water vapor, which accounts for over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect.
Of total CO2 in the atmosphere, only about 3.2 percent is manmade. Furthermore, CO2’s heat absorptiondiminishes with every added unit, and clouds, which act as a thermostat, cool a warming planet and warm a cooling planet.
Almost makes you think God planned it that way, doesn’t it?
