NASA's CO2-scan sat arrives at launch site NASA's first satellite dedicated to monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide has arrived at its launch site. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will take off from Vandenberg airforce base in January. According to the space agency, the spacecraft will help to "solve some of the lingering mysteries in our understanding of Earth's …
You need to consider the entire process...
"For those interested, the satellite's launch won't itself involve any significant CO2 emissions. However, as it is to go up on an all-solid-fuel Taurus stack, there will be a good deal of aluminium oxide and hydrogen chloride. These chemicals are generally seen as rather nastier than ordinary old carbon dioxide, if not such a pressing global issue."
Aluminium oxide is an inert white powder, messy but not nasty. Hydrogen chloride is nasty but reacts with just about anything it touches to form some other fairly inert substances.
To make the satellite and launcher and to run the chemical plants that produce the chemical for the solid fuel rockets does involve a lot of industrial activity. Guess what....this involves burning fossil fuels. Yep, you can't make satellite and launch vehicle without producing carbon dioxide.
You can't even go to the toilet in a modern country without a carbon dioxide burden because the sewage plants are built using concrete and steel (massive furnaces used in their production) and they run on electricity (coal or gas fired turbines).
Hopefully, the studies that will be aided by the satellite instruments will help us to understand the atmospheric processes and direct any changes in our behaviour in a most appropriate manner. (Yeah, fat chance, I know).
It's ok, you can ignore him, the raw data will be available for anyone to interpret.
My feeling is that it will be another blow to the man-made global warming "skeptics", although they don't really have much left going for them any more. Last I heard, even the most vociferous had given up on the lie that "there is no warming", and there don't seem to be any sun/orbit/natural-cycle theories that haven't been thoroughly discredited around at the moment. Let's hope the data gets us one!
Depend on your definition of harmless. Most powders are pretty harmless until they are airborne and you breath them in.
Hydrogen chloride does react with almost anything to form generally unreactive compounds. On the other hand it's the cloud of hydrochloric acid step that's the dangerous part, not what they end up as
Well surprise, we're sending something up into space that has created a few nasties. That is hardly surpirising. However, sometimes in order to get the long-term goal you have to make some short-term sacrifices.
I'm all for looking at what can be done to minimise the impact of people on the planet, and I am all for preventing the excesses of dirty greed but I still have the opinion that the whole global warming cause-and-effect thing is being manipulated to suit the aims and objectives of a group of people, rather than a fully balanced & wholly scientific approach being taken here. When you start with the assumption/hypothesis/position that the reason for global warming is X, the drive is to prove that this is the case. Classic science is based on *disproving* a theory and moving on to the next one.
My personal opinion is that this is too complex an issue to blame on any one thing, and that there may well be more than one 'thing' that we need to do about it. For example, reducing the worst fossil fuel use is one thing, but other issues - such as population control, changing building materials (and building lifetime objectives) - should be looked at as well. At the moment it's all like 'lets drive electric cars and ride pushbikes and we will save the polar bear and Father Christmas's house' and not a holistic look at the balance between man and planet.
Mark (if you're out there today) would you disagree?
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