First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected with NASA-Designed Instrument | Hacker News Reader

First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected with NASA-Designed Instrument

jpl.nasa.gov

122 pointsmywacaday39 comments

And this is exactly why _they_ don't want NASA pointing back to Earth... And why they want them to only have enough funding for the megaprojects that redirect federal money into red states.

"There's nothing to see here! Move along!"

But really, I'm glad they managed to get this out there despite the political shenanigans. It looks like they manage their own shenanigans by providing information / assistance, while not actually doing the leg work on building it or deploying it...

It will help to eventually find the hotspots (which, if in the US, are likely businesses skirting laws for profit... Or poor monitoring by the business). In either case, we can have more information on where to act.

What specifically are the “political shenanigans”? Do you have any evidence/links?

I personally don’t think studying earth is really what I want out of NASA. I would expect that funding to go towards study of space. For Earth, I would view that as more the job of the EPA or some other agency, and think it’s more appropriate for them to set aside funds for a satellite or whatever they need.

But yes it’s interesting to see where there are unexpected plumes. I suspect a lot of those are in third world countries where regulations and rule of law is worse, and it may be hard to address those effectively (except by subsidizing them). Sure there are some examples in the US, but the ones in the article seem much smaller in magnitude.

Depending on who wins the election, but one party has made publicly known that they will specifically defund or worse the agencies that will report this kind of information. What other examples of political shenanigans do you need? The same party that when they were in office removed the ability of these same agencies from making these type of releases to the point that they created "rogue" social media accounts.

> one party has made publicly known that they will specifically defund or worse the agencies that will report this kind of information

Evidence on the specific claim you’re making? Defunding government agencies for savings or efficiency is not the same as trying to defund things specifically to hide certain scientific data with some sinister goal.

> What other examples of political shenanigans do you need?

I’m looking for evidence that supports the GP’s claim. Are there political acts that redirected money from NASA into red states, with an intent to funnel funding based on that political leaning? Is there evidence that they tried (and succeeded?) interfering with specific projects on the grounds that it would show pollution sources that are politically problematic (as opposed to simply defining NASA’s mission as studying things outside of earth)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

Just defunding agencies from reporting science is bad enough regardless of where they move the money. Denying the part because it's not the whole of what you're looking for says more about you than anything else.

The US has been through exactly this before:

(2016):

     On space issues, a senior Trump advisor, former Pennsylvania Rep. Bob Walker, has called for ending NASA earth science research, including work related to climate change. Walker contends that NASA’s proper role is deep-space research and exploration, not “politically correct environmental monitoring.”

~ https://theconversation.com/eyes-in-the-sky-cutting-nasa-ear...

(2018) Trump White House quietly cancels NASA research verifying greenhouse gas cuts

~ https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-white-house-qu...

And, again, NASA's mission is assisted by testing instrument designs from space on the only planet we have complete surface access to .. otherwise it's just diddling about with remote guesswork sans ground truthing.

The tragedy of MAGA is that this is the tragedy of the commons in an adversarial setting, where some members are actively trying to destroy the commons to gain political power. Add to that foreign power interference to finance helpful idiots and it’s not surprising that even obvious common goods, like triaging where accidental greenhouse gas leakage happens are treated adversely.

I imagine the foreign agencies running these interference campaigns as caricatures sipping champagne/cognac/etc, cigar smoking, fully belly laughing that is occurring in all of these places at how little effort is being expelled on their part causing so much chaos on our part.

Funding from "Carbon Mapper, a new nonprofit organization, and its partners – the State of California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL), Planet, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University (ASU), High Tide Foundation and RMI"

From https://carbonmapper.org/articles/carbon-mapper-launches-sat...

I don't know enough about the EPA's charter to know if this would be within their realm or not. Certainly launching and managing satellites is within the purview of NASA.

> I would expect that funding to go towards study of space.

Space itself is pretty dull .. it's mostly a near perfect vacuum after all.

Planets and stars, galaxies and clusters are more interesting.

How does NASA perfect the remote scanning of a planet from an orbital platform if not working out the designs close to home first?

The EPA provides ground-truthing, surface level observations across the planet, these are used to calibrate and test results from orbiting instrument packages with more challenging transfer functions ( the path from what an instrument actually produces to an interpretation of what that signal "means" ).

You are getting a well-deserved correction to your ignorance of political forces that might result from perceived threats to the oil and gas industry.

I want to comment on a separate thing, about responsibility for the measurement, that’s in your second paragraph.

Developing the spectroscopic measurement of methane from space took a lot of time and engineering skill. (I happened to observe some of this work as part of $dayjob.) In the US, the responsibility for developing novel space measurement technology has historically gone to NASA.

It is proven in space (raised to “TRL 9” in the jargon) by NASA, and then transitioned to other sectors, like NOAA or USGS, for operational use. The prioritization and maturation is very well developed at this point.

Part of the reason it rests with NASA is that systems for spectroscopic measurement of gases (in this example) are also used for other space missions, e.g. planetary and astrophysics. For instance, some of the team of this methane instrument overlaps with the MISE team that will use spectroscopy for Europa https://europa.nasa.gov/spacecraft/instruments/mise/). Besides sharing personnel and knowledge, I believe some of the sensor hardware for MISE and for that in OP was fabricated at the same facility.

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Nothing wrong with ignorance .. asking for a source, as you did, is implicitly saying you recognize that you may be ignorant. The only shameful ignorance is ignorance of ignorance.

That said, I assumed the "You are getting a well-deserved correction" part you're replying to had a typo, or was referring to some other post. I didn't parse it the same way. To me, if a correction of ignorance is "well deserved," that's a vague compliment.

When someone points to an area of my ignorance, I research the hell out of it to become educated on the matter. If I were to become offended by this being pointed out, I would have succumbed to stupidity.

I see where you’re coming from, but the reality is not as stark as you have put it. The forces you point to are real, but it’s more complex because many people have seen the value in learning about Earth.

A huge reason we have a NASA Earth observing system (and not just weather satellites) is the studies that grew out of the CFC damage to the ozone layer [1]. Ground stations and aircraft and balloons turned out not to be enough to assess it, so the measurements moved to space and use spectroscopy now.

(The current fleet: https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/missions/)

This has led to comprehensive CO2 observation from space, and sea surface temperature, and many other climate-related measurements including methane. All this goes back many decades at this point. It’s not a few people who managed to launch one satellite!

[1] For short, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Observing_System#History..., but see also: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3472

It’s likely that countries will get CO2 satellites to point fingers at each other. Ending up with everyone monitoring everyone. Also, CO2 import taxes will be introduced to protect local industries like steel, fertiliser, and cement.

For businesses it is actually in the best interest to get clarity on the rules early on. If they stay behind on technology to reduce emissions, they might eventually lose out.

Here's the interactive map with nearly 6.5k plumes detected: https://data.carbonmapper.org/#1.04/31.9/19.2

This is an unusual one: one of California's largest methane plumes (689 kg/hr) is a cheese factory,

https://data.carbonmapper.org/?details=CH4_other_250m_-120.8...

What exactly is going on there? Are they dumping some sort of nutrient waste into a, wastewater pond?

The link says there are 17379 Plumes and 6418 Sources globally.

The project is funded by 501(c)(3) non-profit Carbon Mapper. Tanager-1 was built by Public Benefit Corp and publicly traded Planet Labs. I understand that the funding raised from the non-profit paid for the licensing of the technology developed at JPL, NASA's only federally funded R&D center managed by CalTech.

I wonder with this data, it'll push communities to do something about these plumes if they are close to their home.

It will be interesting to take the data and normalize it by population density. It won’t be a perfect metric since I’m guessing a lot of these plumes will have their source material sourced from elsewhere e.g. landfills, recycling centers, manufacturing

Wow, Texas.

But, I'm not sure if the data is complete across the globe yet. There doesn't seem to be much data over China yet.

And even if there were data from China, there's very little that could be done about it. It's not like the US could shame the plank in their eye.

Just because we can’t do anything about it doesn’t mean that China won’t. They haven’t been completely unresponsive to internal pressure on air pollution and armed with public data, the government might want to take action. Most countries in the world don’t have the resources to run these kinds of satellites anyway so they depend on NASA/ESA to make this kind of data available to decision makers.

It would make much more sense for the country that NASA is part of to use the data to make changes within itself. Let's focus on the changes we can control not the changes we wish others to make. The problem is that within the US this is believed to be junk science, fake news, and whatever other nonsense labels used.

not very many years ago, the public news in the USA said flatly that climate change was a "hoax" to "get money".. some people still say things like that in public. Meanwhile, the clock is obviously and plainly ticking into irreversible changes.

Throw any and all science information into the public now and see what sticks IMHO

Why not both?

That is, a global measurement and a regional measurement? (Regional, with airborne and in situ for validation of the large scale measurement.)

And appropriate global and regional studies? They are highly synergistic! Maybe something integrated like:

https://above.nasa.gov/about.html?#questions

> Why not both?

Without the "moral high ground", there's no way anyone would listen to someone pulling a "pot calling the kettle black", "do as I say not as a I do", or whatever other phrase you like. Attempting to influence someone like that does nothing positive for your image

Hey, at least I didn’t use the Spanish version, that would have been even worse!

I’ll restate. Restricting analysis within national borders does not make scientific sense in many cases.

The arctic/boreal region studied in the link I gave is of prime interest to US/NASA because it contains Alaska, and Alaska is exposed to climate change in compelling ways, but it also includes about half of Canada because the processes there are the same and an integrated analysis makes more sense.

Besides adjacency, there are other cases where critical regions (Greenland ice sheets come to mind, https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/nasa-greenla...) affect the US, even though they aren’t in the US.

Ditto for the climate forcing from Saharan dust (https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit). That instrument is interesting bc it was originally put up to observe land composition but it has also been a pathfinder for CH4 detection!

Finally,there are analogous biomes overseas that can be studied as what-if cases to see if our models work outside their original domain of application.

Your insistence that we leave China alone is puzzling. More data is always good. China can do what they want with the data, and historically they have made enormous progress in de-carbonizing their society to the point that they are the largest users of solar power in the world, by far.

Nobody should care what some idiots in the US think about this satellite or the data it produces, they aren't the ones that this data is for, their brains are broken, and they won't be the ones taking action.

I'm very happy this sattellite is up there, scanning every part of the earth.

And yes, the US definitely can exert pressure on offending countries through all kinds of measures. These greenhouse gasses don't just affect the country they are coming from, it affects the entire planet, and the first step towards fixing the problem is understanding the problem, and this data is a valuable tool towards understanding the problem.

Not sure what your agenda is, but your nay-saying is part of the problem.

I'm not saying we shouldn't make a global scan. I'm simply saying that the US telling China to cut back its pollution while doing nothing about its own pollution is just too hypocritical to me, and worthy of being mocked and laughed out of the room by any other country.

You're making up that scenario in your own head. The US isn't telling China anything about pollution based on this sattelite.

Trust me, China already knows how awful their air quality is and they are doing something about it themselves. This just gives China one more data point they can use to make life for their own citizens better.

One goal is to do a fine grained global census, just to see what we are confronting:

https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/22/9617/2022/

Previously, a high quality census was done of California and it turned up a nice separation into source categories (e.g., oil/gas extraction, gas transport, dairies, landfills):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1720-3

This was very impactful and influenced legislation and further measurement.

The lead author is the CEO of the nonprofit that coordinated launch of this satellite. He’s been involved in the fundamentals of this measurement for many years, including his time as a lead system engineer at JPL.

I think this is unfair. China is leading the transition to green energy, China does a lot. The data from the satellite is useful for China also, and China can benefit from it, because it means that China doesn't need to launch their own monitoring satellite. And if USA politely point to China that China missed something, I'm sure China will do something about it. Not instantly, and probably with impolite responses like "get off my lawn" like they like, but still China will hear.

They certainly can do something about methane emissions in other countries, such as this proposal (which is similar to the EU carbon adjustment which came into force this year):

https://juliabrownley.house.gov/brownley-introduces-legislat...

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