Climate Monitoring Station Proposed on the Moon

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?

[Bodrius]

If you cannot measure success, how do you know it works?

I'm not sure if this is the cheapest way to get the best measurements, but if we're going to invest seriously on technology to control global warming, having objective measurements to track the results is vital.

Otherwise, knee-jerk reactions, politics and PR will control which green-technologies become mainstream, if any.

Well...

[gaijin99]

I'm in favor of lunar development, but this seems kind of pointless. Wouldn't it make more sense to put the insturments in a polar orbit so they'd be closer and get more accurate readings? Heck, even a geosynch orbit is vastly closer than on the moon.

Cool

[phantomcircuit]

Sending robots to do this kind of work makes much more sense than sending humans, a monitoring station could be fully automated much easier than a human could be put on the moon again.

Re:Cool

[LordVader717]

So true. Sending up balls of meat to do something a robot could do cheaper and easier seems more and more pointless. At most it would require the same amount of funding as a human mission, and the experience gathered would be immensely useful for further missions. Let's face it, humans are going nowhere far soon, and why should Billions be spent on giving a few dozen astronauts a field trip?

Re:Cool

[Guppy06]

TFA didn't mention sending people. Is "ZOMG manned spaceflight is teh expensive!" the "frost pist!" of space-related articles around here?

Alternatively...

[Spazntwich]

We could just use satellites, which we've gotten pretty good at.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

Perhaps, but there is one advantage to putting a weather station on the moon: it'll stay put.
Satellites fall out of the sky, become space junk, or get hit by anti-satellite missiles. Equipment on the moon should stay on the moon, and it won't be as awkward to work around if it stops working. Hopefully it'll take longer to make anti-moonbase missiles than to set this weather station up.

Re:The Moon is a perfect place...

[LordVader717]

Wow, either this is just bait, or you are an astoundingly ignorant being.

First off, if you'd have read the article, you'd have noticed this is about observing terrestrial radiation, not solar radiation.

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.

There's an old saying that goes: "There's plenty more fish in the sea" [bbc.co.uk]

A single volcanic eruption spews more "greenhouse gases" and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activity for a decade.

Now that's just one of the classic bullshit arguments invented by someone who had no Idea. I don't blame you, many have fallen for it, but it's just plain wrong.

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.

There's something called the "solar constant", and there's a reason why it has that second word. That is because it is pretty much constant, with minimal periodic variations (under 0.1%). Not saying that it can't have any effect, but comparing it to burning up vast amounts of Carbon which have amassed over hundreds of millions of years, I'd say we've known where to start looking.

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]

Yeah, cause we know that reducing our energy consumption and CO2 emissions so fundamentally conflicts with the present and future welfare of poor and underdeveloped nations, and that you can't possibly protect the environment and reform the tax system at the same time. It's just too much.

Oh, and if you really want to reduce CO2 emissions, plant a few trees or flowers, they love the stuff.

Even better: Use Biofuel for your energy needs. Maybe you shuold try it too.

Re:The Moon is a perfect place...

[gnuman99]

Stop trolling, troll. You know, people had setellites in space using misterious things called "SOLAR PANEL"s for their power production for a few decades now. And guess what? The EM flux from the sun didn't change, yet, global warming!

According to
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide [wikipedia.org]
Earth's atmosphere contains about 3 trillion tons of CO2.

Now, let's get some real data about emission,
    http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm [ornl.gov]
In 2003, 7.303 billion tons of additional CO2 emitted from fossil fuels

See the nice graph they have,
    http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/cumulat ivedata.JPG [ornl.gov]
Now if they just add India and China accelerating consumption, we would see a huge spike at the end.

So, we are have an ADDITIONAL 7.3/3000 => 0.24% of CO2 by weight per year to the ecosystem.

Now, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the _Earth's_atmosphere [wikipedia.org], ALL volcanoes release about,
    130-230 MILLION tons of CO2.

So humanity is releasing, oh, 30-50 TIMES the amount of CO2 by volcanoes during the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME., well, back in 2003.

This also means that current natural system is balanced at volcanic emissions of CO2, not 50 times that, hence CO2 is rising and not being tanked.

Also, if 3000 billion tons of CO2 is 380ppm, then 7.3 (from fossil fuels in 2003) is only 1ppm.. So, that doesn't even account for the total increase of CO2 now hence the number is too low (additional release of CO2 from burning forests probably accounts for the rest, but who weights forests??). CO2 is going up at a current rate of 2 ppm per year and accelerating.

Anyway, what you say is bullshit as seen above. Volcanoes do not account for even a fraction of what is happening in CO2.

Just wait a little bit and "mother nature" will help us increase the CO2 rate much, much faster than even currently. When the Siberian and Canadian bogs defrost and warm up, the Atlantic (aka. Bermuda Triangle) and Black Sea releases their methane (it just needs to warm a little bit more), well, then we'll see global warming. CO2 will be over 1000ppm by end of the century and then, well, you or your kids may just see what happens then.