Climate Change Video

[Random News] Watching the Earth breathe from space (Measuring CO2 from space) and more…

July 11, 2014 — 1 Comment
  1. Nasa Launches Carbon Dioxide Observer
  2. How Solar Energy Empowered a Nicaraguan Community Once Devastated by War
  3. How El Niño will change the world’s weather in 2014
  4. How Arizona Could Soon Tax Thousands of Residents For Going Solar

Nasa Launches Carbon Dioxide Observer

Image Credit: NASA

Image Credit: NASA

NASA successfully launched its first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric CO2. Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) will be NASA’s first dedicated Earth remote sensing satellite to study atmospheric carbon dioxide from Space. OCO-2 will be collecting space-based global measurements of atmospheric CO2 with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize sources and sinks on regional scales. “Sources and sinks” are the keys words here. As I posted before, when CO2 is added in the atmosphere only a part stays in there (which drives warming). The remained part could be absorbed by the ocean, and land. However, exactly where is highly uncertain. Thus this sensors will help to solve this part of the puzzle. Also OCO-2 will also be able to quantify CO2 variability over the seasonal cycles year after year.

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Can We Really Count on Plants to Slow Down Global Warming?

June 15, 2014 — 4 Comments

The idea is simple. Fact 1:Plants reduce CO2 in the atmosphere trough photosynthesis. Fact 2: Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere stimulates plants growth. Thus fact 1 + fact 2 is the perfect scenario. If there is more CO2 in the atmosphere and plants are growing more because of that, the solution to global warming is to plant more trees right? Well not really. There is a missing piece called Carbon cycle.

Image credit: http://www.greenpeace.org

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The Climate Wars

May 26, 2014 — 5 Comments

Eric Pooley’s Book.

 

In 2008 the BBC released a documentary called Earth – The Climate Wars. In this 3 part television documentary the Scottish geologist Dr. Iain Stewart covers some aspects of the theory about global warming, the battle between the scientists who believe that climate change is caused by humans and the sceptics scientists, and challenge of predict the effects of global warming. It is a really good documentary. 

In the first episode Dr Iain Stewart traces the history of climate change from its very beginning and examines just how the scientific community managed to get it so very wrong back in the Seventies. Along the way he uncovers some of the great unsung heroes of climate change science, as for example the secret organisation of American government scientists, known as Jason, who wrote the first official report on global warming as far back as 1979. He shows how – by the late 1980s – global warming had already become a serious political issue. It looked as if the world was uniting to take action. But it turned out to be a false dawn. Because in the 1990s global warming would be transformed into one of the biggest scientific controversies of our age.
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3 Movies that will make you think a little bit

April 27, 2014 — 3 Comments

My favourites genres of movies are documentaries and cartoons. It is hard to explain why and yes, I am addicted to them.  I was trying to remember some movies I saw in the past which are related to environmental problems and its possible solutions. One movie that really caught my attention was “An inconvenient Truth“.  Al Gore talks about climate change and CO2 levels. I remember the famous scene where he stepped on a manlift Continue reading

Can We Hear The Sound of Our Warming Planet?

April 4, 2014 — 1 Comment

Does it sound weird for you? Great you are not alone. I had the same reaction but guys from University of Minnesota combined music and environmental data.

It is not new that our planer is warming.  Ok, lets stand on the shoulders of giants (I hate when someone uses those quotes and I don’t know where it came from). In 2010 J. Hansen and his fellows scientific friends published an article at Reviews of Geophysics. They used the Goddard Institute for  Space Studies (GISS) (NASA) analysis of global surface temperature change. Yes, there are different groups of scientists doing different analysis of global temperatures. So when you hear someone saying: “scientists said that average global temperature is rising”, it is a specific group using some specific data (not always they work together). However these analysis are not totally independent because they must use much the same information (same satellites,  meteorological stations, etc). Roughly speaking, they complete each other. Continue reading