Carbon

One of the greatest technical challenges facing climate science has been the lack of a global network capable of merging real-time satellite measurements and ground information to monitor the changing health of the planet.

Site data can provide snapshots of disturbing climate changes, but scientists haven't been able to give the entire planet a full body scan.

That’s about to change.

Today, NASA and Cisco announced a public-private partnership to develop a "Planetary Skin." The project will coordinate information from satellites and air, land and sea-based sensors to monitor environmental conditions around the world, with a particular focus on carbon emissions and climate change.

NASA lost some of its carbon monitoring capability last week when its Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite was destroyed in a failed launch, but it hopes the Planetary Skin network will still be able to provide a clear picture of Earth's carbon sinks and emissions.

The project will start in the world's rainforests, which are valuable sinks for naturally storing carbon and are technically easier to monitor than cities.

Imagine if in a poverty-stricken sector of the equatorial band, littered with acidic soils barely fit for farming, there were jet-black patches of dirt, seeded with charcoal and so fertile that they could be planted continuously for over 40 years without applying fertilizer.

Then imagine that those patches were so loaded with carbon that they had six to seven times the amount of carbon per pound of the surrounding soils, that Western scientists could partially replicate the process through which the black earth was made, and that by burying carbon in earth they could augment soil fertility and, perhaps, leach carbon out of the atmosphere and reverse global warming.

Perhaps the jig is already up—too much detail. What we’re talking about is terra preta, or more colloquially, biochar, the Amazonian miracle soil.

NASA Climatologist James Hansen has endorsed terra preta—literally black earth—as a carbon “draw-down strategy.” British chemist James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, says it is the “one way we could save ourselves.”

So let’s check it out. But first, what is it?

The 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide that human activities produce annually is a global problem, but scientists still don't have a truly global picture of where carbon in the atmosphere comes from and where it goes.

NASA hoped to begin creating that picture with the launch this morning of its $270 million Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO), but the satellite never made it to orbit. A piece of equipment that protects the satellite as it shoots through the atmosphere failed to separate from the rocket, NASA officials said. The OCO satellite crashed down in the ocean near Antarctica.

Michael Freilich, NASA's Earth Sciences Division director, said the agency would be working in the next weeks and months to find ways to continue to advance the OCO mission, including assessing other available satellites. The OCO took about eight years to develop, and the loss of the satellite was a disappointing setback but not the end of the mission, he said.

We will take a good, solid and thoughtful look at how best to advance Earth science, given all the assets we have available now and into the near future, and decide how it is best for science and for the nation to move forward.

The OCO satellite would have provided data complementary to Japan's newly launched climate satellite GOSAT (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), also known as Ibuki (Japanese for breath). Together, they could have provided the most complete picture of carbon sources and sinks – places such as oceans or forests that absorb carbon – ever seen.

GOSAT measures global concentrations of both CO2 and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, but has a lower resolution, meaning a fuzzier picture. OCO would have only measured carbon dioxide, but it would have taken many more measurements, and at a higher resolution. Its smaller measurement footprint would have decreased interference from clouds, and in general, created a more detailed picture.

As David Crisp, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator of the mission, explained:

Part II of a two-part series on the USDA farm census

The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture farm census reveals two patterns of development in the agricultural sector. One is the praiseworthy increase in the number of small farms that we discussed in Part I. The other is a pernicious increase in the number of big farms.

The census showed that about 6 percent of the nation's farms produce 70 percent of its food. From a different angle, farms with more than $1 million in sales produced 59 percent of the nation’s food in 2007, up from 47 percent in 2002.

So despite the countervailing trend of small farms, our food production system is still a concentrated, industrial food production system. And that means an emission-spewing food production system.

Here’s why: