By Elmer Beauregard
A funny thing happened when NASA released the data fro their new Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite this week, it was opposite of what they expected.
Scientists had assumed that the CO2 increases in the atmosphere were emitted in the northern hemisphere largely due to industrialization and coal burning power plants. They created a computer animation to show where they believed CO2 was emitted and how it traveled around the globe. They were hoping that their new satellite would bolster their theory but the data came back saying just the opposite that the primary sources of CO2 on the planet are coming from below the equator from the tropical rainforests.
Here is the animation that NASA released back in November it is based on the data from 2006 and show a time lapse of the entire year based on the data they had. The problem is they seem to miss all the CO2 emissions from the largely non-industrial southern hemisphere.
The data released from the OCO-2 Satellite was the average from Oct.1 – Nov.11, 2014 so I made a screen grab of what it looked like on Nov. 1st. As you can see most of the CO2 was supposed to be emitted in the northern hemisphere.
But the actual data from the OCO-2 satellite shows most of the CO2 emissions are in the southern hemisphere from the rainforest regions. This seems to say that CO2 increases in the atmosphere are largely a natural phenomenon and not man caused. In fact the supposed biggest emitters of CO2 Russia, Europe, India and the Untied States hardly register. There is a large orange ad red spot over China as one would guess, but I would argue that that spot is more inland and is probably from China’s rainforest.
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