La Science, She Is Settled

The first global maps of atmospheric carbon dioxide from NASA’s new Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission demonstrate its performance and promise, showing elevated carbon dioxide concentrations across the Southern Hemisphere from springtime biomass burning.

Yes, your (patriotic) tax monies are well spent, tracking that most deadly atmospheric compound, carbon dioxide. You know, the stuff that comes from SUVs and causes bad weather and doom and extinction. Except, not so much.

To my decidedly unscientific eye, it seems that there are great swaths of the vile stuff emanating from, lessee, the Amazon, the Congo and Indonesia (we'll leave aside China for the moment). And what do these three large areas have in common? Land Rovers? Perhaps a few, but surely not that many. Coal plants? No so much. Green plants? Why yes, yes they do have vast tracts of pristine, virgin forests to protect and to cherish and hug. They are the "lungs" of the planet, I am told. But, to echo the great words of a great man, they have a fevah, or bronchitis, or pleurisy, or something nasty.

According to the spin analysis of this data, the elevated CO2 concentrations are caused by "springtime biomass burning". Really? That would seem to indicate one heck of a lot of biomass burning. Like half of South America and the lower African continent in flames. You'd think we would have noticed without having to send a satellite into orbit. It couldn't be caused by something natural, like oh, say, photosynthesis or some such silly thing. No, it would need to be something man-made, so biomass burning it is.

As for China, I wouldn't discount some industrial sources of carbon dioxide, but that cloud covers about 2,000,000 sq miles and I'm not sure that even the Chinese could burn that much coal. They might have a few plants or ferns growing there too. I'll have to look that up on Wikipedia.

Iceland has only ice and volcanoes, so unless it is dry ice (which I learned from High School Science! is frozen CO2--such a devious, revolting substance that it masks it's true nature), I'll take a wild guess and say that the plume descending from that vicinity originates from volcanic sources.

You'll notice with wry wonderment that the countries most 'concerned' about carbon dioxide are in fact mostly blue and green, indicating low levels. In Europe and the UK this is to be expected since they no longer have any industry to speak of, but North America is surprisingly green too, aside from a dusting of orange over the greater Atlanta area and Washington State. Oddly, there are no high levels in the Midwest where the flatulent cattle roam.

All in all, from squinting at the map, tilting my head in a quizzical manner, it seems pretty much what I might expect to see if there were some sort of large orb of burning gasses, say about a 100 million miles from the planet, heating it and doing some crazy mumbo jumbo sciency mojo on the forests and the oceans and such. But I could be wrong, as I say, I'm no scientist.