ONE of the many sets of initials being bandied about at the climate conference in Copenhagen is MRV—monitoring, reporting and verification. In theory, it seems fairly straightforward: if countries commit themselves to limiting the production of particular greenhouse gases, they need to be able to keep track of what they are doing and to tell the rest of the world, which must in turn be able to verify the claims. In practice, there are any number of problems, one of which is that when you start to look at what is actually happening in the atmosphere, it does not necessarily resemble anything that is being reported. Countries therefore commit themselves to actions without any real idea of the current state of play. As Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography put it at one of the many side events surrounding the negotiations on the Kyoto protocol and its eventual successor, it is like going on a diet without weighing yourself.
Dr Weiss and his colleagues excel at the precise measurement of gases present in vanishingly small amounts—things measured in parts per trillion, rather than the parts per million used for carbon dioxide. There are a number of potent greenhouse gases produced and used by industry that are found in the atmosphere at this sort of level, and governments that are party to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, the document on which global climate politics are based, have to report on how much of some of them they emit, based on what they think their industries produce. Dr Weiss’s concern is that when he and his colleagues measure how much of any one of these gases has actually been added to the atmosphere in a given year, then compare that with the amount which the countries of the world own up to emitting, the two totals fail to tally. No prizes for guessing which is usually bigger.
AP Ray Weiss (left) with a colleague and the cylinders used to collect air samples
Take sulphur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas used—among other things—as an insulator in some sorts of high-voltage equipment. It is to carbon dioxide as a furnace to a candle: one kilogram of the stuff causes as much warming as 23 tonnes of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Weiss’s as-yet-unpublished figures, about four times as much of it is being emitted as is reported under the framework convention. More worrying, perhaps, is that the trend of reported emissions is decreasing gently whilst the actual emissions are, if anything, going up.
Knowing that there is a problem does not necessarily help to pin down what it is. There may be deliberate under-reporting, there may be sources that no one has identified as such, or there may be bad accounting. To make things clearer the levels must be measured in a number of different places. Then, by knowing which ways the winds blow and when, it is possible to start identifying the sources of the gases. On one occasion this monitoring even led to a change in official estimates. In 2005 a study of which parts of Europe were producing methane, the most important long-lived greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, showed that various countries were producing more than they thought. Germany subsequently changed its estimates, though no others did.
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To do something similar around the world for methane, nitrous oxide and the various industrial greenhouse gases (which together have a warming effect similar to methane’s) would mean adding dozens of new monitoring stations to the sparse network currently operating. The cost—tens of millions of dollars a year—would be large by the standards of atmospheric chemistry laboratories, small by the standards of the satellites needed to collect some other climate data and tiny by the standards of the problem faced. Yet monitoring the atmosphere is a perennially underfunded and underappreciated endeavour.
Dr Weiss’s late colleague at Scripps, Dave Keeling, had repeatedly to fight bureaucracy and budget cuts to keep making the accurate measurements of the atmosphere’s composition that constituted his life’s work. His perseverance gave the world great insight—and a new icon, the Keeling curve. This seasonally undulating record of carbon dioxide’s inexorable rise over the past 50 years goes a long way towards explaining why 190 countries have seen fit to gather now in Copenhagen. Things are better today, says Dr Weiss, than when Keeling fought his battles. But the seemingly simple matter of looking at which greenhouse gases are where, and in what quantities, still needs a lot more work.
Dr Weiss and his colleagues excel at the precise measurement of gases present in vanishingly small amounts—things measured in parts per trillion, rather than the parts per million used for carbon dioxide. There are a number of potent greenhouse gases produced and used by industry that are found in the atmosphere at this sort of level, and governments that are party to the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, the document on which global climate politics are based, have to report on how much of some of them they emit, based on what they think their industries produce. Dr Weiss’s concern is that when he and his colleagues measure how much of any one of these gases has actually been added to the atmosphere in a given year, then compare that with the amount which the countries of the world own up to emitting, the two totals fail to tally. No prizes for guessing which is usually bigger.
AP Ray Weiss (left) with a colleague and the cylinders used to collect air samples
Take sulphur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas used—among other things—as an insulator in some sorts of high-voltage equipment. It is to carbon dioxide as a furnace to a candle: one kilogram of the stuff causes as much warming as 23 tonnes of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Weiss’s as-yet-unpublished figures, about four times as much of it is being emitted as is reported under the framework convention. More worrying, perhaps, is that the trend of reported emissions is decreasing gently whilst the actual emissions are, if anything, going up.
Knowing that there is a problem does not necessarily help to pin down what it is. There may be deliberate under-reporting, there may be sources that no one has identified as such, or there may be bad accounting. To make things clearer the levels must be measured in a number of different places. Then, by knowing which ways the winds blow and when, it is possible to start identifying the sources of the gases. On one occasion this monitoring even led to a change in official estimates. In 2005 a study of which parts of Europe were producing methane, the most important long-lived greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, showed that various countries were producing more than they thought. Germany subsequently changed its estimates, though no others did.
Click here to find out more!
To do something similar around the world for methane, nitrous oxide and the various industrial greenhouse gases (which together have a warming effect similar to methane’s) would mean adding dozens of new monitoring stations to the sparse network currently operating. The cost—tens of millions of dollars a year—would be large by the standards of atmospheric chemistry laboratories, small by the standards of the satellites needed to collect some other climate data and tiny by the standards of the problem faced. Yet monitoring the atmosphere is a perennially underfunded and underappreciated endeavour.
Dr Weiss’s late colleague at Scripps, Dave Keeling, had repeatedly to fight bureaucracy and budget cuts to keep making the accurate measurements of the atmosphere’s composition that constituted his life’s work. His perseverance gave the world great insight—and a new icon, the Keeling curve. This seasonally undulating record of carbon dioxide’s inexorable rise over the past 50 years goes a long way towards explaining why 190 countries have seen fit to gather now in Copenhagen. Things are better today, says Dr Weiss, than when Keeling fought his battles. But the seemingly simple matter of looking at which greenhouse gases are where, and in what quantities, still needs a lot more work.