New NASA Carbon Probe to Help Track Climate Change ( OCO

SAN FRANCISCO – As NASA's new Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) moves closer to its planned launch next week, the team responsible for the spacecraft faces enormous challenges to fly the first-ever probe to map carbon dioxide levels across.

"OCO will be making one of the most challenging measurements of any atmospheric trace gas that has ever been made," said Charles Miller, OCO deputy principle investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena Calif.

OCO is poised to launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop a Taurus XL rocket on Feb. 24 to begin its carbon dioxide-hunting mission. The spacecraft will use three high-resolution spectrometers built by Hamilton Sundstrand Sensor Systems of Pomona, Calif., to measure carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules in the Earth's atmosphere based on the way those molecules absorb sunlight.

That data will then be used to show the specific regions where natural and man-made sources are producing carbon dioxide as well as highlighting areas, called sinks, where oceans and plants are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. OCO will circle the Earth every 99 minutes, mapping the globe every 16 days from its near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit.

Through various activities including forest fires and the burning of fossil fuels, sources on Earth emit approximately 8 billion tons of carbon every year. But only half of that carbon remains in the atmosphere. The other half is hidden - absorbed by Earth's oceans, plants and soils, ...

"The relative fraction of carbon that is staying in the atmosphere versus going into plants and oceans varies dramatically from year to year," Michalak said. "We want to understand why plants and oceans are taking up as much carbon as they are ... so we can predict how they will behave in the future."

Kissinger’s world order
By PAUL SCOTT
WASHINGTON — One of the most
intriguing proposals in Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger’s recent address
to the United Nations has gone virtually
unnoticed in press reports covering it.
‘ This is his call for the International
Council of Scientific Unions and the
World Meteorological Organization to
urgently investigate the world’s
changing weather and prepare
“guidelines for immediate international
action’’ to handle problems created by it.
Inserted in his U.N. speech at the last
minute, the Kissinger proposal has
brought a flood of inquiries from foreign
governments as to its significance and
the reasons for including such a scientific
proposal in the heart of a major U.S.
political-economic policy pronouncement.
The key Kissinger statement
being studied by these foreign governments
is:
“The poorest nations, already beset
by man-made disasters, have been
threatened by a natural one: the
possibility of climatic changes in the
monsoon belt and perhaps throughout
the world. The implications for global
food and population policies’ are
ominous.
“The U.S. proposes that the International
Council of Scientific Unions and
the World Meteorological Organization
urgently investigate this problem and
offer guidelines for immediate international
action.”
State Department aides say
Kissinger’s proposal grew out of some of
the findings of Reid Bryson,
meteorologist and director of Environmental
Studies at the University of
Wisconsin, and studies of several other
foreign scientists.
Bryson, considered one of the top
experts in climatology today, contends
that the world’s climate is reverting
rapidly to what he describes as “its less
beneficient norm.” A wanning trend,
which began in 1890, peaked in 1945 —
and ever since temperatures have been
dropping sharply.
According to Bryson’s theory, the
most prominent effect of the falling temperatures
is to alert the integrated
system of winds which sweep around the
planet.
This in turn, he claims, has the potential
for human disaster of unprecedented
magnitude, since it will affect the
growing of food throughout many
regions .of the world. For example, he
stresses, this new wind pattern has
blocked vital monsoon rains from large
sections of Africa, Asia, and Central
America.
Bryson forecasts the climate
situation will get worse. He warns it
could affect “the whole human
occupation of the earth — like a billion
people starving.”
It is Bryson’s theory that from about
1890 to 1945 was merely a short respite
from the “little ice age.” He predicts
that we are now headed slowly into
another major ice age. Global mean
temperatures have been as high as they
are now for only about five per cent of
the time for the past 700,000 years, he
points out.
Under the Bryson theory, man’s
activities have played a significant role
in the cooling effect. Dust, both manmade
and natural, suspended in the
atmosphere produces the fall in temperature
because it circumvents the
warming effect of sunlight and carbon
dioxide.
Bryson contends that smoke from
slash and burn land clearing, and windblown
dust from mechanized agriculture
are dangerous human contributions to
the air pollution he believes is responsible
for the global cooling trend.
Many noted climatologists remain
unconvinced by Bryson’s theories about
the cause of the present cooling trend
and the likelihood of its persistence. One
of the most prominent of these is J.
Murray Mitchell, Jr., of National
O c e a n i c and A t m o s p h e r i c
Administration. He reports:
“We observe these trends in the
North Hemisphere, and we’ve seen
they’re real. But we can’t find the central
tendency of the trends or know how
long they will last.”
Mitchell believes that the present
cooling trend will reverse itself for
natural reasons. Other doubter- of
Bryson’s theory and forecasts include
Astronomer Walter Roberts and MIT
Meteorologist Kurd Wiliett.
What is surprising in Kissinger’s
proposal is that he apparently goes along
with Bryson’s grim scenario — or at
least regards it as a plausible outcome,
based on present knowledge.
One government insider reports that
Kissinger looks on his proposal as
another step to “transform the concept
of world community from a slogan into
an attitude” —a condition needed for the
development of a loosely knitted world
government.
By seeking “international action” for
the world’s major problems — energy,
population, monetary, food, and the
changing weather — Kissinger hopes to
bring into being a new “international
order.”
Note. In his U.N. speech, Kissinger
supported “the concept of a charter of
economic rights and duties of states put
forward by Mexico’s President
Echeverria of Mexico.’’
In private White House meetings,
Kissinger has been cool to a proposal by
full-scale study be made of Russia s
weather-controlling experiments and
their impact on the world weather,
especially the change in course of jet
streams flowing over the U.S. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff favor the study to determine
if the Russians are trying to use
control of the weather as a military
weapon. ^
Climatologists are concerned that
Soviet plans to divert the course of
several rivers that now empty into the
Arctic Ocean could change weather conditions
over the U.S.

REF: Daily Capital News, Jefferson City, MO. 3 May 1974

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