From NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY
With intense wildfires in the western U.S. and frequent, intense hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation is again affected by extreme weather-related events resulting from climate change. In response, cities, states and regions across the country are developing policies to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide (CO2). Even though many state and local governments are committed to these goals, however, the emissions data they have to work with is often too general and too expensive to provide a useful baseline and target the most effective policy.
Professor Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems today published results in the Journal of Geophysical Research detailing greenhouse gas emissions across the entire U.S. landscape at high space- and time-resolution with details on economic sector, fuel and combustion process.
Gurney, who specializes in atmospheric science, ecology and public policy, has spent the past several years developing a standardized system, as part of the Vulcan Project, that quantifies and visualizes greenhouse gases emitted across the entire country down to individual power plants, neighborhoods and roadways, identifying problem areas and enabling better decisions about where to cut emissions most effectively. Leading up to the nationwide study, Gurney produced emissions maps of several different large cities, including the Los Angeles megacity, Indianapolis, the Washington, D.C./Baltimore metropolitan area and Salt Lake City.
Funded by NASA, Gurney developed the high-resolution emissions map as an effective tool for scientific and policy applications. His goal is to provide policymakers across the nation with a means to strategically address problem areas instead of taking an inefficient, costly approach.
“We’re providing U.S. policymakers at national, state and local scales with a scalpel instead of a hammer. Policies that might be relevant to California are possibly less relevant for Chicago or New York. They need to have information that reflects their unique conditions but follows a rigorous, standardized scientific approach. In this way, they can have confidence in the numbers which, in turn, will stimulate smart investment in reducing emissions.”
One of the strengths of Gurney’s approach is validation by atmospheric monitoring of CO2 from ground-based and satellite instruments.
“By synthesizing the detail of building and road-scale emissions with the independence and accuracy of atmospheric monitoring,” Gurney said, “we have the best possible estimate of emissions with the most policy-relevant detail.”
An animated video of the Vulcan Project output is available online.
Through characterization of CO2 emissions across the entire US landscape every kilometer, from coast to coast, Gurney points out that the system offers every US city an inventory on emissions. “By extracting all cities in the US from our data product, we can offer every city a consistent and comprehensive assessment of their emissions. Like the US weather forecasting system, this problem is best solved with a single systemic approach and shared with city stakeholders so they can do what they know how to do better than anyone – reduce emissions in ways that meet their individual needs.” Gurney said.
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Data from the Vulcan mapping project is available on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Data Archive. Additional imagery is available on the Vulcan website. This research was made possible through support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration grant NNX14AJ20G and the NASA Carbon Monitoring System program, Understanding User Needs for Carbon Information project (subcontract 1491755).
The paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JD032974
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How would a local policymaker use this “carbon footprint” map? Kill half the people in the major cities, then force the remainder to the countryside to be hunter gatherers?
So city planners and town councils see that the local cement plant is emitting proportionately more CO2. Shut it down. Except that they could no longer build roads, buildings or other infrastructure. Auto plant or widget factory a hot spot? Shut it down and send the manufacturing, emissions and jobs to China.
The whole premise of this project is that emissions are a “problem” rather than an indication of a vibrant, active economy offering health, sanitation, relative wealth and comfort to the general population. For such a smart, well-educated man, Dr. Gurney doesn’t seem to have a grasp on reality. As has been well-documented in the pages of WUWT, emissions are a modest concern at most, and the only logical, societal-scale energy transition should be a gradual, multi-decadal transition to natural gas and thence to nuclear, along with gradual improvements in efficient use of resources. Wind, solar and biomass/biofuels are a high impact, poor-performing and essentially useless side-show. To the extent that emissions due to combustion and land use change are a concern, that is largely a challenge for developing nations.
The ridiculous part of the project is that everyone knows the emissions come from intensively developed high population density areas. At the same time urban planners are create more multifamily housing to increase population densities. The high population density advocates will be competing with “ depopulation” programs .
Boggles the mind that researchers systematically ignore Svensmark-Zharkova’s empirically demonstrated postulate (2007 – 2018) that cosmic radiation driven by fluctuating solar magnetic fields (SMFs) affects cloud-cover, impelling decades-long planetary temperatures (not “climate”).
Speaking of academic/professional defaults, from December 2017 Australian researcher Robert Holmes’ “Mean Molar Mass version of the Ideal Gas Law” has definitively stated that global atmospheric surface temperatures (GAST) of any –repeat, any– planet = PM/Rp, where P = Atmospheric Pressure times M = Mean Molar Mass over R = Atmospheric Density times Gas Constant p. Since CO2 is not a factor, no “greenhouse gas” effect applies.
In thus refuting AGW legates’ “carbon footprint” pasquinade, Holmes’ Law negates these Luddite primitivists’ central anti-“fossil fuel” (sic) premise. Svensmark-Zharkova and Holmes aside, for the first time since the pre-Cambrian Ediacaran Period (635 – 541 mm YBP), from the late Pliocene 3.6 mm YBP Earth’s continental plate-tectonic dispositions have blocked global atmospheric/oceanic circulation patterns by walling off Eastern from Western hemispheres, inducing cyclical 102-kiloyear glaciations interspersed with median 12,250-year interstadial remissions.
For the record, skewed by the 1,500-year Younger Dryas “cold shock” Earth’s latest Holocene Interglacial Epoch ended 12,250 + 3,500 – 14,400 = AD 1350, succeeded by a 70-year Grand Solar Minimum (AD 1350 – 1420) plus a 500-year Little Ice Age from 1350 to 1850/1890. Following a 140-year “amplitude compression” rebound to AD 2030, Earth’s 7.5 billion souls face a looming Pleistocene chill-phase due to cover 60% of habitable landmasses with ice-sheets two miles thick.
I would prefer to see a map of CO2 per population
and maybe a map of CO2 per GDP % or similar.
That is, what do you get in return for the CO2 you emit?
“I would prefer to see a map of CO2 per population”
+1
Astute. And quite inconvenient for them. It would show trends 180 out from what they so fervently wish to show.