NASA

With opponents of U.S. climate action sowing doubt about science and climate scientists, federal agencies are putting the data online and explaining it in simple language to help the public understand.

NASA recently launched its latest site, “A Warming World,” with a series of videos, images and articles looking at the bigger picture of Earth’s warming trend. It’s part of NASA’s larger "Global Climate Change: NASA's Eyes on the Earth" site, which opens with a glance at the planet’s vital signs, clearly highlighting the reason for global concern:

Solar cycles of magnetic fields and sunspots have become a popular foothold for climate change skeptics. A new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, however, shows that even if predictions of an extended minimum of solar activity are accurate, it will have only a tiny effect on the Earth’s climate in comparison to the current track of human-caused warming.

“There is a lot of hysterical stuff out there,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “For some reason, solar effects seem to attract more than their fair share of cranks. There are always people with these statistical models claiming that it would have a big effect, but mostly that’s just nonsense.”

The new study, conducted by Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, modeled what might happen to global temperatures if the sun enters a period of low magnetic and sunspot activity resembling that of the Maunder Minimum.

Global warming IS a time bomb.

There may still be time to defuse it, but that requires policy-makers to take the actions that are needed, not the ineffectual actions they are discussing.

Despite the publicity that global warming has received, there is a large gap between what is understood by the relevant scientific community, and what is known by the people who need to know, the public and policymakers. Global warming is small compared to day-to-day weather fluctuations, so it is hard for people to recognize that we have a crisis – but we do.

The climate system has great inertia, caused, e.g., by the 4-kilometer-deep ocean and the thick ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland, which have only partly responded to the human-made changes of atmospheric composition. That inertia is not our friend. It is a Trojan horse. By the time the public notices that change is underway the momentum of the climate system may be sufficient to guarantee much larger changes. The climate system can pass tipping points, such that large change continues out of our control.

The bad news is that we have already passed into a dangerous range of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The good news is that if we act smart and promptly it is still feasible to achieve a safe level of atmospheric gases, and the actions needed to achieve that would have multiple benefits in addition to climate stability.

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.

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: