The National Research Council recently sent a Letter Report on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to the administrators at NASA regarding the inadequacies of the current greenhouse gas monitoring and estimating methods. Our capabilities for monitoring C02 emissions are too limited to verify an international climate treaty, which seems imminent from the planned Copenhagen climate change summit set to take place in December.
The failed launch of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory is one of the factors in this limitation, as the satellite would have provided a means to measure emissions from space, assessing a baseline level of emissions from specific cities or individual power plants. The report is obviously timed to coincide with NASA’s plan to discuss the need for launching a replacement satellite in the coming months. Key climate scientists and policy makers are clearly in favor of a replacement.
