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Published online 5 December 2007 | Nature 450, 785-786 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450785a
News Feature
Earth Monitoring: The crucial measurement
The “Carbon Club” began meeting on Fridays about a decade ago, setting up shop in whatever spare meeting places it could find at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Its members, a handful of scientists with extensive experience in remote sensing of Earth's atmosphere, set about brainstorming ways to provide one of the most crucial data sets of the twenty-first century: precise measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere on a fine enough scale to definitively track the gases' sources and sinks.
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Determining sources and sinks of C might be better termed _a_ crucial measurement and not _the_ crucial measurement. To calculate the Earth's energy balance we need to better measure the planet's albedo in addition to CO2 concentrations. We were on our way to doing just that with data from DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) which has been built but not launched. Despite endorsement by the National Academy of Sciences, NASA scrapped that mission and has not explained why. How about it NASA?
But it's all a bit of a misnomer isn't it? CO2 is a factor, but there are more important gases in global warming - methane for example: http://earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm
Nick - if you read the article you refer to you will see: By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane ... Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together ...
Sorry, Nigel not nick. So much for careful reading