#ExxonKnew -- CO2's Role in Global Warming Has Been on the Oil Industry's Radar Since the 1960s

Historical records reveal early industry concern with air pollutants, including smog and CO2, and unwanted regulation

BY NEELA BANERJEE, JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR., DAVID HASEMYER AND LISA SONG, insideclimate news, april 13, 2016

Documents reveal that the risks of climate change were being discussed in the inner circles of the oil industry in the 1960s, earlier than previously documented. Credit: Photo of Exxon's Bayway oil refinery in New Jersey by the Environmental Protection Agency

The oil industry's leading pollution-control consultants advised the American Petroleum Institute in 1968 that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels deserved as much concern as the smog and soot that had commanded attention for decades.

Carbon dioxide was "the only air pollutant which has been proven to be of global importance to man's environment on the basis of a long period of scientific investigation," two scientists from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) told the API.

This paper, along with scores of other publications, shows that the risks of climate change were being discussed in the inner circles of the oil industry earlier than previously documented. The records, unearthed from archives by a Washington, DC, environmental law organization, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), reveal that the carbon dioxide question—an obscure corner of research for much of the 20th century—had been closely studied since the 1950s by some oil company researchers.

By the 1960s, the CO2 problem was gaining wider scientific recognition, especially as President Lyndon B. Johnson's science advisers and leading experts brought it to the attention of the White House in 1965.

"If CO2 levels continue to rise at present rates, it is likely that noticeable increases in temperature could occur," SRI scientists Elmer Robinson and R.C. Robbins wrote in their 1968 paper to API.

"Changes in temperature on the world-wide scale could cause major changes in the earth's atmosphere over the next several hundred years including change in the polar ice caps."

Ten years later, the world's leading oil company, Exxon, would launch an ambitious in-house research program into the emerging science of climate change, as detailed by InsideClimate News last year in an investigative series. Beginning in 1978, Exxon researchers hoped their work would identify the risks climate change posed to the company's business and earn it a seat at the table when policymakers moved to limit CO2 emissions, according to internal documents. By the late 1980s, the company and its allies would instead challenge the scientific basis for strong action on climate change.

In a new series of articles, ICN begins to examine how the industry confronted pollution concerns during the infancy of climate research in the mid-20th century. It is based on hundreds of public documents assembled by CIEL, along with others gathered by ICN.

The documents trace early academic research into rising carbon dioxide levels. They show how the oil industry monitored that published work, and help explain the beginnings of its own research. They also show how industry's reaction to mid-century regulation to curtail other forms of air pollution, such as smog, helped shape its approach toward the risks of carbon dioxide.

The documents reveal a deep and persistent interest by industry in the CO2 issue, according to Carroll Muffett, a lawyer who is president of CIEL. If it is shown that oil companies knew fossil fuels posed dangers to the public, he said, the industry might become vulnerable to product liability complaints.

"From a products liability perspective, these documents raise potential claims that oil companies failed to warn consumers about a potentially serious risk linked to their products," he said.

Muffett's institute, an advocacy group that provides policy research and legal counsel on energy and environmental matters, is releasing its findings just as several state attorneys general have begun investigating how much oil companies knew about climate change and what they decided to do with their knowledge.

"Once the companies learned this science, they can't unlearn it," Muffett said. "Everything they did after this is done against the backdrop of the information they have from at least the 1950s onward.

"This to me is a critical point," he said. "When Exxon and other companies are funding climate change denial in later stages and focusing on uncertainties, how does what they are saying now compare with what they knew at a much earlier stage?"

Exxon has responded that its scientists at the time found that "many important questions about climate change remained unanswered and more research was needed." A spokesman for API did not respond to requests for comment.

Pollution Concerns Begin Rising

By the late 1940s, industrial pollution from the wartime surge and post-war boom began alarming the public. In particular, smog increasingly plagued Los Angeles, garnering the attention of the press and new pollution-control agencies. The sky turned a pale yellow, residents routinely became nauseous and their eyes burned, children were forced to play indoors, and acres of crops withered.

Members of the Highland Park Optimist Club in northeast Los Angeles wear smog-gas masks at a banquet, circa 1954. Credit: Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library

By the early 1950s, new science pointed to the oil industry as a major culprit, showing that nitrogen oxide emissions and uncombusted hydrocarbons from car tailpipes and refineries formed smog when exposed to sunlight.

As new agencies spawned new regulations, API and similar organizations set up a task force called the Smoke and Fumes Committee to monitor air pollution research and to commission projects by a handful of key consultants, including SRI. Originally affiliated with Stanford University, it was the industry's main pollution consultant, and eventually became an independent firm in 1970.

The work of the Smoke and Fumes Committee armed the industry for a prolonged struggle against what it considered overzealous regulation, which was based on what the oil companies and SRI called flawed science.

Meanwhile, a growing number of academics had turned their attention to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, tracing where the gas came from and the role that certain "sinks," such as the oceans and forests, played in absorbing it.

Roger Revelle, the director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and his colleague Hans E. Suess published a landmark paper in 1957 about increasing CO2emissions and the role of the oceans in absorbing some of it. The media, including The New York Times and Time magazine, sporadically wrote stories about increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

Scripps scientist Charles David Keeling installed machines at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii to measure carbon dioxide levels on a regular basis.

The years between 1957, when Revelle first concluded that the oceans would not absorb all industrial CO2 emissions, and 1960, when Keeling accurately measured atmospheric concentrations and showed that they were definitely increasing, ushered in a new age of expanding climate research.

Already, some oil company scientists were conducting basic CO2 research, including several with Humble Oil, which eventually became part of Exxon.

By then, it was generally accepted that the burning of fossil fuels had released significant quantities of additional CO2into the atmosphere, with some studies putting manmade emissions at 13% above natural levels since the Industrial Revolution began.

Humble's researchers studied the fingerprints of fossil fuel emissions in the wood of growing trees. Only a small fraction of the CO2 from fossil fuels showed up. Deciphering what was happening to the rest—mostly absorption into the oceans—was a major focus of research into the carbon cycle then.

As Humble's scientists explored issues like whether the varying climate in wet and dry conditions might influence the rate of carbon uptake by trees, their work intertwined with the rapidly evolving field of climate studies.

A paper by independent scientists in 1958 determined that Revelle and Suess had probably underestimated how much CO2 would build up by the year 2000. The rise could be enough, they noted in passing, to have considerable implications for planetary warming.

A Presidential Spotlight

The report by Robinson and Robbins to API in 1968 was an unusually plainspoken assessment of the risks of CO2emissions within the walls of industry. It is significant not as original research, but as confirmation that the industry recognized a consensus reaching the highest levels of government.

"It seems ironic," the report said, "that given this picture of the likely result of massive CO2 emissions, so little concern is given to CO2 as an important air pollutant."

The SRI report emerged after the carbon dioxide problem had caught the attention of the White House.

President Lyndon B. Johnson/Credit: Yoichi Okamoto

Acting on a warning from his science advisers, Johnson became the first president to publicly mention rising CO2 levels as a problem on par with smog or bomb test fallout. In a message to Congress in February 1965, he declared: "Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels."

SRI's report was mostly based on a paper, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide," that was part of a volume prepared by the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in November 1965.

That 20-page paper, written by Revelle, Keeling and three other top climate scientists, was submitted to the president at a time when environmental concerns were just blossoming into a policy priority. It said that the latest science suggested the increase in CO2 "may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate." Citing a growing body of published research, it discussed the implications for melting polar ice and rising sea levels in the centuries to come.

That SRI was inserting carbon dioxide into a report mainly about conventional pollutants like smog suggests industry had to deal with this new aspect of pollution now that even the president was pointing it out.

"At the point where these issues are matters of public debate, industry has to be looking at them," Muffett said.

In the SRI report's section on CO2, Robinson and Robbins identified it as "the most commonly emitted air pollutant." Still, they noted that CO2 was so ubiquitous that regulators didn't even consider it to be pollution.

"This is perhaps fortunate for our present mode of living, centered as it is around carbon combustion," they wrote. "However, this seeming necessity, the CO2 emission, is the only air pollutant which has been proven to be of global importance to man's environment on the basis of a long period of scientific investigation."

The report also dealt with other uncertainties, such as a possible cooling effect caused by an increase in particulate matter. It noted that the long-term trend of particulate pollution could neutralize warming caused by CO2, but on balance said "the prospect for the future must be of serious concern."

"Although there are other possible sources for the additional CO2 now being observed in the atmosphere, none seems to fit the presently observed situation as well as the fossil fuel emanation theory," the authors wrote.

The SRI paper explored in detail the possible rates of emission, how concentrations might increase and how much temperatures might rise.

The finding—which matched Revelle's—that about half the CO2 emitted seemed to stay in the atmosphere was confirmed later by more sophisticated research. It helped explain why emissions over decades of increased reliance on fossil fuels would lead to a doubling of atmospheric CO2concentrations from pre-industrial times.

SRI also said that unlike local pollutants such as smog, carbon dioxide would last a long time in the global atmosphere. "The natural scavenging processes for removing CO2 from the atmosphere are not sufficient to maintain a stable equilibrium in the atmosphere in the presence of this increase in emissions."

The paper said that better models were needed to estimate more accurately how the increased atmospheric CO2 might boost global temperatures. (The Revelle report had predicted in 1965 that better models might come along in just a few years.)

SRI also repeated Revelle's assertions that if the earth's temperatures rose substantially, it could lead to significant risks for the planet.

"It is clear that we are unsure as to what our long-lived pollutants are doing to our environment; however, there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe," SRI said.

The assessment's frank tone contrasted with the more measured rhetoric Robinson and industry representatives would use in later public reports.

In a paper presented at the World Petroleum Congress in Moscow in June 1971, Robinson wrote that increasing carbon dioxide levels might pose a serious problem. He also said estimating the impact rising CO2 could have on global temperatures would be difficult because of the complexity of atmospheric science.

"The simple conclusion that an increase in absorbed radiation would provide a significantly warmer atmosphere and perhaps would melt the ice caps does not seem to be justified," Robinson wrote.

The National Petroleum Council, an advisory body including top officials of many oil companies, submitted a report to the government in 1972 entitled "Environmental Conservation." The NPC report cited the work of Robinson and Robbins but hewed to a more cautious line, quoting from a review of the emerging research written by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences.

"If at the end of this century, the average temperature has continued to rise and, in addition, measurement shows that the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has also increased, this will add validity to the idea that carbon dioxide is a determining factor in causing climate change," the NPC report said.

It continued to say that it would take until at least 2000 to decide whether global temperatures were rising significantly.

"If indications at that time are that major changes are required," it said, "society can meet that requirement as it has met its challenges throughout history by developing alternative social or technological solutions."

But this seemed to evade what was becoming increasingly clear to atmospheric scientists: If the problem of global warming emerged as their calculations suggested, it meant shifting away from fossil fuels.

In one footnote, the petroleum council cited not only the work of Robinson, but also a paper by an official at the federal Bureau of Land Management, Eugene K. Peterson, who had written a comprehensive overview of climate science and its ecological implications for the journal Environmental Science and Technology in 1969.

Peterson cited projections of increases in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, and early estimates of the resulting temperature rise. He also speculated on side effects such as acute water shortages, increased forest fires, and impacts on fisheries.

And he concluded that if current estimates proved to be correct, the time would eventually arrive —"if it has not already been reached"—that "additional CO2 input through the burning of fossil fuels should cease."

The increasing blanket of CO2 in the atmosphere, he warned, "could prove to have such an effect upon the environment that it will be a major limiting factor for several centuries upon both industrial development and world population."

It would be several more years before a National Academy of Sciences review panel chaired by Revelle would sound a similar warning in 1977—catching the attention of an Exxon employee, Henry Shaw, who helped lead the company's broad climate research in the decade that followed.

But the industry as a whole was already on notice.

Part II.  In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry questioned research that pointed to fossil fuel emissions as the main ingredients of smog, a record that reads like an early draft of its later approach to climate change.   

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/13042016/climate-change-global-warming-oil-industry-radar-1960s-exxon-api-co2-fossil-fuels

Global warming is melting increasingly larger areas of Arctic sea ice − and reducing its vital function of removing CO2 from the atmosphere

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, September 26, 2014

LONDON − The Arctic ice cap has just passed its summer minimum – and it’s the sixth lowest measure of sea ice recorded since 1978, according to scientists at the US space agency NASA.

For three decades, the shrinking Arctic ice – and the growing area of clear blue water exposed each summer – has been a cause of increasing alarm to climate scientists.

Polar seasonal changes are measured annually by NASA, but reliable satellite data goes back only to 1978, For much of the 20th century, the Arctic was part of the Cold War zone, so only Soviet naval icebreakers and US nuclear submarines took consistent measurements − and neither side published the data.

But studies of 17th and 18th century whaling ships’ logbooks and other records make it clear that the ice once stretched much further south each summer than it does today.

Steady decline

In the last 30 years, the thickness and the area of the ice have both been in steady decline, with predictions that in a few decades the Arctic Ocean could be virtually ice free by September, opening up new sea routes between Asia and Europe.

This year could have been worse, although the area of ice fell to little more than 5 million square kilometres − significantly below the 1981−2010 average of 6.22 million sq km.

“The summer started off relatively cool, and lacked the big storms or persistent winds that can break up ice and increase melting,” said Walter Meier, a research scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. “Even with a relatively cool year, the ice is so much thinner than it used to be. It is more susceptible to melting.”

Warming in the Arctic is likely to affect climate patterns in the temperate zones, and the state of the polar ice has become of such concern that researchers are using ground-based and sea-based monitors to explore the physics of the phenomenon.

But there is another reason for the attention: as polar ice diminishes, so does the planet’s albedo − its ability to reflect sunlight back into space.

So, as the ice shrinks, the seas warm, making it more difficult for new ice to form. And greater exposure to sunlight increases the probability that permafrost will thaw, releasing even more greenhouse gases locked in the frozen soils.

Now researchers have found another and unexpected example of climate feedback that could affect the cycle of warming. Climate scientist Dorte Haubjerg Søgaard, of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the University of Southern Denmark, and research colleagues have discovered that sea ice itself is an agency that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

That the oceans absorb the stuff, and tuck it away as calcium carbonate or other marine minerals, is old news.

“But we also thought that this did not apply to ocean areas covered by ice, because the ice was considered impenetrable,” Søgaard said. “However, new research shows that sea ice in the Arctic draws large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean.”

The research is published in four journals, Polar Biology, The Cryosphere, the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres and Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Two-stage pattern

The Danish research team observed a complex, two-stage pattern of gas exchange as ice floes formed off southern Greenland. They measured the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the formation and release of calcium carbonate crystals form in the sea ice, and kept a tally during a 71-day cycle of the carbon dioxide budget.

In the course of this complicated bit of natural cryo-chemistry, they found that some CO2 was carried deep into the ocean with dense, heavy brines, as the ice froze and some was captured by algae in the thawing ice.

They also identified a third factor: the “frost flowers” that formed on the new ice had an unexpectedly high concentration of calcium carbonate.

The profit-and-loss accounting meant that every square metre of ice effectively removed 56 milligrams of carbon from the atmosphere during the 71-day cycle. Over an area of 5 million sq km, this would represent a significant uptake.

But the real importance of the discovery is that scientists have identified yet another way in which the ice – while it is there – helps keep the Arctic cold, and yet another way in which carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans.

“If our results are representative, then the sea ice plays a greater role than expected, and we should take account of this in future global CO2 budgets,” Søgaard said.

As the Arctic warms, sunlight will cause even more CO2 to be emitted by thawing permafrost by oxidizing organic carbon

Scientists discover that, as the Arctic continues to warm, sunlight will be the major cause of CO2 escaping into the atmosphere from vegetation preserved in frozen soil

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, September 4, 2014

LONDON − One of the puzzles of the permafrost has been solved by scientists in the US. The key to the carbon cycle in the Arctic north is not the microbe population − it’s the sunlight.

Such a discovery is not, strictly speaking, concerned with climate change, but with the more detailed question of how the world works – specifically, how the carbon that was once plant material gets back into the atmosphere.

However, since the Arctic permafrost is home to half of all the organic carbon trapped in the soils of the entire Earth, the finding is ominous.

The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet. As it warms, more and more carbon dioxide is likely to escape from the half-decayed tundra vegetation preserved in the frozen soil and will find its way into the atmosphere, to accelerate still further warming.

For the moment, the study is another piece fitted into place in a wider understanding of the carbon cycle.

Organic carbon

Rose Cory, of the University of Michigan, US, reports with colleagues, in the journal Science, that they measured the speeds at which bacteria and sunlight converted dissolved organic carbon in the lakes and rivers of Alaska.

In the standard domestic garden compost heap, the hard work of turning such things as decaying cabbage stalks, potato peelings and grass cuttings back into carbon dioxide and methane is performed by microbes.

But visible and ultraviolet light beams also pack a punch. They too can oxidise organic carbon and turn it back into gas molecules.

In 2013, Dr Cory and colleagues established that levels of dissolved organic carbon in a region that was once permanently frozen were rising, giving microbes and other conversion processes a chance to get to work.

The researchers took samples of flowing and still water from 135 lakes and 73 rivers on Alaska’s North Slope over a three-year period, and then incubated them under differing conditions of light.

More efficient

They found that sunlight was 19 times more efficient than microbes at processing the carbon, and could account for between 70% and 95% of all the carbon released from Alaskan water.

“We’re likely to see more carbon dioxide released from thawing permafrost than people had previously believed,” Dr Cory said. “We are able to say that because we now know that sunlight plays a key role and that carbon released from thawing permafrost is readily converted to carbon dioxide once it is exposed to sunlight.”

Microbes are less efficient in low temperatures. And the sunlight works more efficiently because it can directly degrade the dissolved organic carbon, and can also convert it into a condition that makes it more accessible for the microbes.

“This is because most of the fresh water in the Arctic is shallow, meaning sunlight can reach the bottom of any river – and most lakes – so that no dissolved organic carbon is kept in the dark,” said Byron Crump, a microbial ecologist at Oregon State University, and a co-author of the report. “Also there is little shading of rivers and lakes in the Arctic because there are no trees.”

Keeling Curve Saved! Wendy and Eric Schmidt Award $500,000 Grant to Keeling Curve

Supports continued operation of the iconic measurement series

by Robert Munroe, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, September 3, 2014

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego today announced that Wendy and Eric Schmidt have provided a grant that will support continued operation of the renowned Keeling Curve measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. The grant provides $500,000 over five years to support the operations of the Scripps CO2 Group, which maintains the Keeling Curve.

CO2 Group Director Ralph Keeling said the grant will make it possible for his team to restore atmospheric measurements that had been discontinued because of a lack of funding, address a three-year backlog of samples that have been collected but not analyzed, and enhance outreach efforts that educate the public about the role carbon dioxide plays in climate.

"I'm very grateful to be able to return to doing science and being attentive to these records.  When it comes to tracking the rise in carbon dioxide, every year is a new milestone.  We are still learning what the rise really means for humanity and the rest of the planet,” said Keeling.

Wendy Schmidt, co-founder with her husband of The Schmidt Family Foundation and The Schmidt Ocean Institute, said “The Scripps CO2 Project is critical to documenting the atmospheric changes on our planet and the Keeling Curve is an essential part of that tracking process. As government funding for science in general is decreasing, Eric and I are delighted to work with Scripps to help it continue its benchmark CO2 Project.”

The Schmidt Family Foundation advances the development of renewable energy and the wiser use of natural resources and houses its grant-making operation in The 11th Hour Project, which supports more than 150 nonprofit organizations in program areas including climate and energy, ecological agriculture, human rights, and our maritime connection.

In 2009, the Schmidts created the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), and in 2012 launched the research vesselFalkor as a mobile platform to advance ocean exploration, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans.

In keeping with the couple’s commitment to ocean health issues, Wendy Schmidt has partnered with XPRIZE to sponsor the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE, awarded in 2011, and the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a prize that will respond to the global need for better information about the process of ocean acidification. It will be awarded in 2015.

The Keeling Curve has made measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a flagship station on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa since 1958. In addition, the Scripps CO2 Group measures carbon dioxide levels at several other locations around the world from Antarctica to Alaska. The measurement series established that global levels of CO2, a heat-trapping gas that raises atmospheric and ocean temperatures as it accumulates, have risen substantially in the past century. From a concentration that had never risen above 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 concentrations had risen to 315 ppm when the first Keeling Curve measurements were made. In 2013, concentrations at Mauna Loa rose above 400 ppm for the first time in human history and likely for the first time in 3-5 million years. Multiple lines of scientific research have attributed the rise to the use of fossil fuels in everyday activities.

The measurement series has become an icon of science with its steadily rising seasonal sawtooth representation of CO2 levels now a familiar image alongside Watson and Crick’s double helix representation of DNA and Charles Darwin’s finch sketches. Keeling Curve creator Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, received several honors for his work before his death in 2005, including the National Medal of Science from then-President George W. Bush.

The value of the Keeling Curve has increased over time, making possible discoveries about Earth processes that would have been extremely difficult to observe over short time periods or with only sporadic measurements. For instance, in 2013, researchers discovered that the annual range of CO2 levels is increasing. This finding may point to an increase in photosynthetic activity in response to a greater availability of a key nutrient for plant life.

Nuances in Keeling Curve measurements have similarly identified the global effects of events like volcanic eruptions, influences that would have been difficult to discern if measurements were made infrequently or periodically suspended. In addition, the Keeling Curve helps researchers understand the proportion of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the oceans, which in turn helps them estimate the pace of phenomena such as ocean acidification. In the past decade, scientists have come to widely study the ecological effects of acidification, which happens as carbon dioxide reacts chemically with seawater.

The Keeling Curve could eventually serve as a bellwether revealing the progress of efforts to diminish fossil fuel use. Save for seasonal variations, the measurement has not trended downward at any point in its history.

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/wendy-and-eric-schmidt-award-500000-grant-keeling-curve

NASA Carbon Counter [the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)] Reaches Final Orbit, Returns Data

from JPL, NASA, August 11, 2014

NASA's OCO-2 spacecraft collected "first light" data Aug. 6 over New Guinea. OCO-2's spectrometers recorded the bar code-like spectra, or chemical signatures, of molecular oxygen or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The backdrop is a simulation of carbon dioxide created from GEOS-5 model data. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/NASA GSFC
› Hi-res image

Just over a month after launch, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) -- NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide -- has maneuvered into its final operating orbit and produced its first science data, confirming the health of its science instrument.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is the leading human-produced greenhouse gas responsible for warming our world. It is a critical natural component of Earth's carbon cycle. OCO-2 will produce the most detailed picture to date of sources of carbon dioxide, as well as their natural "sinks" -- places on Earth's surface where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The observatory will study how these sources and sinks are distributed around the globe and how they change over time.

Following launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on July 2, OCO-2 underwent a series of steps to configure the observatory for in-flight operations. Mission controllers established two-way communications with the observatory, stabilized its orientation in space and deployed its solar arrays to provide electrical power. The OCO-2 team then performed a checkout of OCO-2's systems to ensure they were functioning properly.

Through the month of July, a series of propulsive burns was executed to maneuver the observatory into its final 438-mile (705-kilometer), near-polar orbit at the head of the international Afternoon Constellation, or "A-Train," of Earth-observing satellites. It arrived there on Aug. 3. Operations are now being conducted with the observatory in an orbit that crosses the equator at 1:36 p.m. local time.

The A-Train, the first multi-satellite, formation-flying "super observatory" to record the health of Earth's atmosphere and surface environment, collects an unprecedented quantity of nearly simultaneous climate and weather measurements. OCO-2 is now followed by the Japanese GCOM-W1 satellite, and then by NASA's Aqua, CALIPSO, CloudSat and Aura spacecraft, respectively -- all of which fly over the same point on Earth within 16 minutes of each other.

With OCO-2 in its final orbit, mission controllers began cooling the observatory's three-spectrometer instrument to its operating temperatures. The spectrometer's optical components must be cooled to near 21 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 6 degrees Celsius) to bring them into focus and limit the amount of heat they radiate. The instrument's detectors must be even cooler, near minus 243 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 153 degrees Celsius), to maximize their sensitivity.

With the instrument's optical system and detectors near their stable operating temperatures, the OCO-2 team collected "first light" test data on Aug. 6 as the observatory flew over central Papua New Guinea. The data were transmitted from OCO-2 to a ground station in Alaska, then to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for initial decoding, and then to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for further processing. The test provided the OCO-2 team with its first opportunity to see whether the instrument had reached orbit with the same performance it had demonstrated before launch.

As OCO-2 flies over Earth's sunlit hemisphere, each spectrometer collects a "frame" three times each second, for a total of about 9,000 frames from each orbit. Each frame is divided into eight spectra, or chemical signatures, that record the amount of molecular oxygen or carbon dioxide over adjacent ground footprints. Each footprint is about 1.3 miles (2.25 kilometers) long and a few hundred yards (meters) wide. When displayed as an image, the eight spectra appear like bar codes -- bright bands of light broken by sharp dark lines. The dark lines indicate absorption by molecular oxygen or carbon dioxide.

"The initial data from OCO-2 appear exactly as expected -- the spectral lines are well resolved, sharp and deep," said OCO-2 chief architect and calibration lead Randy Pollock of JPL. "We still have a lot of work to do to go from having a working instrument to having a well-calibrated and scientifically useful instrument, but this was an important milestone on this journey."

Over the next several weeks, the OCO-2 team will conduct a series of calibration activities to characterize fully the performance of the instrument and observatory. In parallel, OCO-2 will routinely record and return up to 1 million science observations each day. These data will be used initially to test the ground processing system and verify its products. The team will begin delivering calibrated OCO-2 spectra data to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center for distribution to the global science community and other interested parties before the end of the year. The team will also deliver estimates of carbon dioxide to that same center for distribution in early 2015.

OCO-2 is a NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder Program mission managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Virginia, built the spacecraft bus and provides mission operations under JPL's leadership. The science instrument was built by JPL, based on the instrument design co-developed for the original OCO mission by Hamilton Sundstrand in Pomona, California. NASA's Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida was responsible for launch management.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information, visit:  http://www.nasa.gov/oco2  http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-272

NASA JPL Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite (OCO-2) can track CO2 back to its source, help refine model resolution to regions

Scientists will use measurements from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 to track atmospheric carbon dioxide to sources such as these wildfires in Siberia, whose smoke plumes quickly carry the greenhouse gas worldwide. The fires were imaged on May 18, 2014, by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument on the Terra satellite. Image credit: NASA/LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response 
› Larger image

NASA's JPL, July 18, 2014

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, which launched on July 2, 2014, will soon be providing about 100,000 high-quality measurements each day of carbon dioxide concentrations from around the globe. Atmospheric scientists are excited about that. But to understand the processes that control the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, they need to know more than just where carbon dioxide is now. They need to know where it has been. It takes more than great data to figure that out.

"In a sense, you're trying to go backward in time and space," said David Baker, a scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "You're reversing the flow of the winds to determine when and where the input of carbon at the Earth's surface had to be to give you the measurements you see now."

Harry Potter used a magical time turner to travel to the past. Atmospheric scientists use a type of computer model called a chemical transport model. It combines the atmospheric processes found in a climate model with additional information on important chemical compounds, including their reactions, their sources on Earth's surface and the processes that remove them from the air, known as sinks.

Baker used the example of a forest fire to explain how a chemical transport model works. "Where the fire is, at that point in time, you get a pulse of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning carbon in wood. The model's winds blow it along, and mixing processes dilute it through the atmosphere. It gradually gets mixed into a wider and wider plume that eventually gets blown around the world."

Some models can be run backward in time -- from a point in the plume back to the fire, in other words -- to search for the sources of airborne carbon dioxide. The reactions and processes that must be modeled are so complex that researchers often cycle their chemical transport models backward and forward through the same time period dozens of times, adjusting the model as each set of results reveals new clues. "You basically start crawling toward a solution," Baker said. "You may not be crawling straight toward the best answer, but you course-correct along the way."

Lesley Ott, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, noted that simulating carbon dioxide's atmospheric transport correctly is a prerequisite for improving the way global climate models simulate the carbon cycle and how it will change with our changing climate. "If you get the transport piece right, then you can understand the piece about sources and sinks," she said. "More and better-quality data from OCO-2 are going to create better characterization of global carbon."

Baker noted that the volume of data provided by OCO-2 will improve knowledge of carbon processes on a finer scale than is currently possible. "With all that coverage, we'll be able to resolve what's going on at the regional scale," Baker said, referring to areas the size of Texas or France. "That will help us understand better how the forests and oceans take up carbon. There are various competing processes, and right now we're not sure which ones are most important."

Ott pointed out that improving the way global climate models represent carbon dioxide provides benefits far beyond the scientific research community. "Trying to figure out what national and international responses to climate change should be is really hard," she said. "Politicians need answers quickly. Right now we have to trust a very small number of carbon dioxide observations. We're going to have a lot better coverage because so much more data is coming, and we may be able to see in better detail features of the carbon cycle that were missed before." Taking those OCO-2 data backward in time may be the next step forward on the road to understanding and adapting to climate change.

To learn more about the OCO-2 mission, visit these websites: http://www.nasa.gov/oco2 , http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-237

Record early CO2 above 400 ppm at Mauna Loa, report Boulder scientists

Boulder scientists report record-early high CO2 readings at key site

400 parts per million at Mauna Loa reached two months ahead of 2013

by Charlie Brennan, Daily Camera - Boulder News, March 22, 2014

Carbon dioxide readings at Mauna Loa Observatory:

Sunday: 400.13 ppm

Monday: 401.12 ppm

Tuesday: 401.18 ppm

Wednesday: 401.28 ppm

Thursday: 400.87 ppm

More info: esrl.noaa.gov/gmd

Carbon dioxide levels at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and analyzed in Boulder have reached a disturbing benchmark earlier than last year and have done so for several days running, scientists said.

The readings hit 400 parts per million for CO2 every day from Sunday through Thursday. That is a level recorded at that observatory for the first time only last year — and in 2013, it was not reached until May 19.

The levels of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere move in seasonal swings, typically peaking in May and hitting their low point in September.

"Each year it creeps up," said Jim Butler, director of the global monitoring division at NOAA.

"Eventually, we'll see where it isn't below 400 parts per million anywhere in the world. We're on our way to doing that."

Pieter Tans, chief scientist in NOAA's global monitoring division, said, "This problem could become much worse. The climate change we see at this point is just beginning."

Mauna Loa has been a premier atmospheric research facility, continuously monitoring and collecting data related to atmospheric change since the 1950s. The undisturbed air, remote location and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity there are considered ideal for monitoring particulates in the atmosphere that can cause climate change.

Asked if seeing such numbers on carbon dioxide emissions was a warning bell, Butler said it is — but it is one that had previously been rung.

"It's not particularly a warning bell any more than it was last year," Butler said. "I think 400 ppm just says we're not doing anything to change the increase in CO2. Last year was a warning bell. It's always a warning bell."

Patricia Lang, who works with carbon cycle greenhouse gases at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, measures gas containers Friday. NOAA has been measuring carbon dioxide levels from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that are consistently high. (Cliff Grassmick / Daily Camera)

He said it is not, however, necessarily a so-called tipping point — because scientists don't yet know where the tipping point is. Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen about 120 ppm from pre-Industrial Age levels, with 90 percent of that increase coming in just the last century.

The Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii, is part of a global network of about 65 data collection points utilized by NOAA from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole, including four fully equipped baseline observatories. Readings are registered on site, but 2.2-liter and pressurized 0.7-liter flasks are also shipped directly to NOAA in Boulder for analysis on a weekly basis.

Greenhouse gases being screened for in the testing include carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, nitrous oxide, surface and stratospheric ozone, and halogenated compounds including CFC replacements, hydrocarbons, sulfur gases, aerosols, and solar and infrared radiation.

Butler said readings from across the Earth show that the presence of CO2 is steadily growing by about 2.1 ppm each year. In the 1960s, he said, the annual global average growth was lower, about 0.7 ppm per year.

Sites in the Arctic Circle registered CO2 of 400 ppm or higher a year before Mauna Loa reached that level last May. Butler said the South Pole should also reach that level in a few years.

"It's going up faster," Butler said. "If we want to stabilize carbon dioxide, we have to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent. That would stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, where it is now."

But Butler is not optimistic the trend will be reversed.

"I've been watching for decades, and I don't see any changes in behavior, worldwide," he said. The drivers of climate change continue unabated in the developing world, he said, and he doesn't see options to fossil fuels, such as solar and wind power development, and utility companies' deployment of smart grids, becoming a significant enough factor quickly enough to reverse the trend.

"Those would be good things to do. But we're not doing it," Butler said. "I expect to see CO2 levels keep rising until changes are made."

Tans agreed, saying, "CO2 is still increasing at a record rate, and thereby committing the Earth to additional climate change in the near future."

Contact Camera Staff Writer Charlie Brennan at 303-473-1327 orbrennanc@dailycamera.com.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_25397460/boulder-scientists-report-record-early-high-co2-readings