This environmental group is launching its own satellite to learn more about greenhouse gas leaks

When the Environmental Defense Fund told commercial space guru Tom Ingersoll that it wanted to launch a satellite to measure methane from oil and gas operations, he says his reaction was “Whoa! You guys want to do what?”

A rendering by the Environmental Defense
Fund of a methane-detecting satellite. 

Yet that’s what the EDF is doing. It is well on its way toward raising about $40 million. It has tapped into the work of Harvard University researchers to fine tune sensors. And it has reached out to Ingersoll and others in the commercial space business to create a device that will be able to measure methane emissions on a 125-mile wide swath with pixel resolution of less than  five-eighths of a mile.

EDF will also get support from TED Talks, which hopes to spur fundraising for a variety of causes through its “Audacious Project.”

Read Steven Mufson’s story from The Washington Post - “This environmental group is launching its own satellite to learn more about greenhouse gas leaks.”

Global sea level rise rate speeding up, 25 years of satellite data confirms

The rate of global sea level rise is accelerating as ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland melt, an analysis of the first 25 years of satellite data confirms.

Satellite data indicates sea levels will rise around 61 cm between now and 2100.

The study, by US scientists, has calculated the rate of global mean sea level rise is not just going up at a steady rate of 3mm a year, but has been increasing by an additional 0.08mm a year, every year since 1993.

If the rate of change continues at this pace, global mean sea levels will rise 61 centimetres between now and 2100, they report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"That's basically double the amount you would get if you only had 3 mm a year with no acceleration," said the study's lead author Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado.

Read the ABC News story by Genelle Weule - “Global sea level rise rate speeding up, 25 years of satellite data confirms.

A life loaded with contradictions

Life of the climate activist is loaded with contradictions.

Much of what they do is about helping people better understand the dynamics of our climate’s disruption and within that explain that effective mitigation of atmosphere damaging emissions arises from human behaviour.

That behaviour of the activist is strangely contradictory. Simply doing what they do is the behaviour of which they are critical.

Living and working within the modern living is energy intensive and to reach a point where a person’s life is effectively carbon-neutral, they are forced to become remote to the lifestyle they really want to change.

That person may live a wonderfully environmentally benign life, but buried in their bolthole, they have little influence on the wider society, except for a small circle of friends and acquaintances.

The idea that we should live the life we want to see others pursue is a wonderful ideal, but to live an absolutely carbon-neutral life could only be achieved by abandoning modern life completely.

Most climate scientists and other eager to broadcast their message far and wide employ the carbon-costly benefits of modern life to engage with others in the hope that humanity, generally, can reach some sort of conclusion about how the world can, and should approach this rapidly unfolding difficulty.

An ABC story headed: “Rocket blasts off with NASA satellite to help track climate change” tells of how NASA has launched a satellite to help with weather forecasting and tracking global climate change by measuring how much water is in the Earth's soil.

That in itself is a weird contradiction – everything about a rocket is energy-intensive from the embedded energy to the massive amounts of fossil fuels it takes to get the satellite into orbit.

So the contradiction dilemma continues – we know climate change is real,, we know is happening and we know it has the potential threaten life on earth, but yet a little like the Easter Islanders who built and worshipped the very idols whose creation threatened them, we continue to build and employ the technology and ideas that has taken us to where we are now.

It was Einstein who said something about insanity being found among those who used the same ideas repeatedly while expecting a different result. The technology that gave us rockets is what disrupted earth’s climate system and yet will still employ it as we search for answers.