Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon 106
CryogenicKeen writes with the news that a University of Michigan study indicates the perfect place to monitor Earth's climate system would be the surface of the moon. The side facing us is a perfect location to monitor temperatures and weather patterns here on our planet, and a UM paper proposes an international effort to deploy monitoring stations on Earth's natural satellite. "On the near side of the airless moon, where Apollo 15 landed, surface temperature is controlled by solar radiation during daytime and energy radiated from Earth at night. Huang showed that due to an amplifying effect, even weak radiation from Earth produces measurable temperature changes in the regolith. Further, his revisit of the data revealed distinctly different characteristics in daytime and nighttime lunar surface temperature variations. This allowed him to uncover a lunar night-time warming trend from mid-1972 to late 1975, which was consistent with a global dimming of Earth that occurred over the same period and was due to a general decrease of sunlight over land surfaces."
Re:expensive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:4, Informative)
The Moon is a perfect place... (Score:2, Informative)
The overwhelming arrogance of some people to believe that mere humans and our assorted activities have a major impact on the (average) mass of the atmosphere of about 5,000 trillion metric tons, is astounding in the extreme. A single volcanic eruption spews more "greenhouse gases" and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activity for a decade. And yet the worst that happens (globally)are beautiful sunsets for a couple of years then its gone.
The most logical and common sense reason for climate temperature variations is that great, bright, flaming ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky. Which, by the way, is known to be variable in its output. So putting a sensor array on the moon, away from the influence of human activities , will finally settle this matter once and for all, so we can get on with more important matters. Like fair taxes http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer [fairtax.org], or ending genocide http://www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=yes [savedarfur.org], or who will be the next "American Idol". Oh, and if you really want to reduce CO2 emissions, plant a few trees or flowers, they love the stuff.
Re:expensive? (Score:4, Informative)
No, you can't, because walking down the street where the car is tells you nothing about the pollution being created by the power plant that makes the electricity, nor does it tell you anything about the possibly highly toxic metals and/or chemicals used in the battery which will pollute where and when the car is disposed of.
The electric car may be a step towards less pollution. It may not be. To be honest, I suspect it will be. But you're not going to be able to tell just by watching the car. You're going to need to be a little more systematic than that.
Chris Mattern
Re:We've got something sitting here ready to go up (Score:4, Informative)
Granted it will probably last longer than that but maybe not.
Re:Is this a good idea? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Instead of watching us, why not watch the moon? (Score:3, Informative)
I believe someone also just sent a probe into Jupiter. It took a while to get there, but we should have climate data on Jupiter and some of its moons by now.
I think we've even tried a solar orbiter.
So, we're already doing other planets. (Climate on Venus: hot enough to melt probes--but then, Venus has a huge problem with greenhouse gasses.) We just need to play with our own some more.