Fighting Emissions from Space | David Crisp
Channel: World Economic Forum
Date: 21/10/2015

“We’re basically watching the Earth breathe,” says David Crisp in this video for the World Economic Forum. The atmospheric physicist introduces us to the work of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2). It’s a remote sensing satellite that measures how much carbon dioxide is in our planet’s atmosphere, where it’s being absorbed, and the impact on climate change.
 
Get in depth analysis by watching the full presentation above, or read a selection of quotes below.
 
On counting carbon
“Today we're going to talk about making measurements of carbon dioxide - the gas that you exhale - from space. The amount of carbon dioxide in our system is increasing over time. We've actually seen about a 40 percent increase in the carbon dioxide abundance of our atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age.”
 
“As human beings we are a major contributor to this global carbon cycle, primarily by burning fossil fuels to heat our homes, for transportation and other activities. Human activities add about forty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year; about five and a half tonnes of carbon dioxide for every man, woman and child on the planet. It's enough to increase the carbon dioxide abundance of our atmosphere by one percent per year in a century. At this rate we would double the carbon dioxide abundance in our atmosphere.”
 
“We've been making very detailed measurements of carbon dioxide over the entire earth since about 1958. We measure carbon dioxide in parts per million. We are putting an increasing number of measuring stations from the South Pole to the North Pole. Spring, summer, fall, winter; spring, summer, fall, winter. We can actually measure that signature with our instruments on the ground. Every year we have about 150 of them reporting every week.”
 
On carbonating the oceans
“Only half of the carbon dioxide we add to our atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels stays there. On average the other half is being absorbed by the oceans and by the land plants somewhere on the planet.”
 
“We know how much is going into the ocean, because as it goes in it makes it more acidic. We’re acidifying the ocean. Why do we carbonate soft drinks or beer? To keep things from growing in it. We are carbonating our oceans. 10 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide generated by the burning of fossil fuels is ending up in the ocean.”
 
“The really weird thing is that somewhere ten billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is going into the land, into the trees. That's how much carbon dioxide we are talking about disappearing somewhere into the system over the last 50 years, and we don't know where. What's going on there? I'm afraid the answer is still is we don't know.”
 
On studying carbon from space
“One way to improve our chances of studying the system is do just what we did for weather. We understand where carbon dioxide is going in our system, because we have about 150 stations around the globe making these measurements. How well can you predict the weather if you had only 150 weather stations? About as well as we could do in 1930, and that’s not good.”
 
“The way we have revolutionized weather prediction is to apply a bunch of satellites and space, and make a lot of observations from those satellites and then actually start to study. This turns out being a very hard problem. It took until about the year 2000 before a couple of groups finally started to understand how we might measure invisible gas from space to an accuracy of a couple parts per thousand.”
 
“I led a group back in 2000 that came up a measuring the absorption of reflected sunlight as the light goes from the Sun to the surface after the satellite. Carbon dioxide like other gases absorb only certain colors of light. We monitor those colors very accurately, with a very sensitive instrument with parts and pieces derived from things like the Hubble space telescope. We were able to actually make a measurement, so we proposed it to Nasa as a competition with 30 other possible earth science measurements. We won. So we started building our Orbiting Carbon Observatory in 2001.”